 Who said that Navarra Media was just the new statesman for people who do Keterman and read Mark Fisher? Sometimes we do culture and to prove that point I'm very pleased to be joined by a real-life stalwart of the creative arts, Frankie Boyle. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing? I do read a bit of Mark Fisher, you are. Well, of course you do. I always wouldn't let you on. So Frankie Boyle needs no introduction but I'm going to give him one anyway, the host of Frankie Boyle's New World Order and author of a new title which is out and unbound called The Future of British Politics. So I want to start with this book, this essay. It's called The Future of British Politics. My first thought reading it was that it was really optimistic for you to assume that there would be a future of British politics. I kind of feel sometimes that I'm locked in a car boot while baby boomers slam down the pedal on death drive. So I wanted to ask first, how did you get to this point of grappling with the future? And isn't it inherently optimistic to say that there is one? Oh, sure. I mean, I also sometimes think though that pessimism is a type of optimism. Because like if you didn't think there was hope, why would you be, you know, giving people a pessimistic spiel? It's just another kind of side of optimism. When I used to work in mental health, I worked with a lot of people who were catatonic. And in a way, I think that's like a much more defensible, defensible kind of philosophical position to have. I'm just not going to say anything. This is part. But I actually got into it. I was doing an interview with a guy called Don Parson, who's this really brilliant Scottish poet. He's like my favourite Scottish poet. And when I got to interview him for the show, Don Godlove was a very nervous guy on camera. He doesn't appear on camera a lot. So I was kind of thinking even at the time, we're not going to use this. And he was like, oh, could you write an essay for this thing I've got? And I was really relieved that there was just some quid pro quo where I could go, sure, because I know we're not going to use the thing. I was like, sure. And I saw this real look of relief and almost joy in his face. And I thought, man, this is going to be a long essay. He's got rid of a serious responsibility here. And it was like 15,000 words or whatever. It wasn't ended up in this little bit. I mean, so there's a lot in here. You go from China, technology, climate change, Brexit. And I kind of feel like I'm chucking a dart to start anywhere. But I mean, let's start with climate change. And one of the things that you talk about is there's this ambivalency feel towards the climate movement, which is on the one hand, it is the most worthy cause that's going. And on the other hand, it is very white, very middle class. And I was thinking about where that discomfort comes from. And I was wondering, is it essentially that climate activists are in a state of denial about what it will take to force decarbonisation? And that's not just the XR stuff of inviting cops to embrace their sacred yoni or whatever, but just the fundamental idea that our democracy is capable of delivering a break with the interest of capital. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very good point. I mean, what I don't really get into in the book is I try and keep it optimistic, because we're getting into an end game here of maybe the next 10 years, certainly the next 15 years could be absolutely vital to whether life survives on Earth. And maybe it's, I mean, like you say, maybe it's too late a time in history for nihilism. I did a lot of nihilistic shows and stuff in my early days. And I kind of think now there just isn't time for that. So perhaps the climate movement has got to look at things like that of going, you know, these are these are big decisions and big principles that people might have to compromise on. For example, is it, is it too late to build up a proper left media that's going to challenge mainstream media ideas about decarbonisation? Do you need to enter into like mainstream media organisations? And, you know, the same as political parties, obviously. I mean, it better not be too late. Otherwise, we're fucked. But you know, there is that thing, isn't there? We're like, I was watching some of your videos today, and I'm quite excited to be doing this. By the same time, if I went into channel four and you were there ahead of factual, I would be like, Oh, fuck, we could really get something done here. We could really do something important. You know, I think people in the left have got to think about that when you make decisions about how they spend their time. You know, people who talk now about making new political movements or whatever, do you need to take over old ones? Do you need to try and take over or democratise existing institutions? But I suppose to take that point, I mean, I would obviously love to be channel four's head of factual because, you know, maybe I could afford a TV licence then. But it assumes that the left's lack of representation in these institutions is a product of disengagement rather than exclusion. Oh, no, no, I mean, there's exclusion is exactly the word. I mean, they used to talk about in terms of representation in television, and I think it's exclusion is a much better word to use. And there's no excuse for it. I mean, there should be quotas for all kinds of things imposed on Britain's media institutions, I think. I mean, I think that the one quota which would make a huge difference is in the highest echelons of public life. You should only have 7% of those jobs go to privately educated people. Yeah, okay. I mean, I think that's a good start. I mean, you've also got things like I mentioned one start in a bit because one of the ones that always horrifies me, 1.5% of directors come from black or minority backgrounds in Britain, you know, and directing is such a key, you know, part of how Britain sees creativity and part of how, you know, the Western world sees as a kind of what to or possession. And it's just not allowed for people who aren't white. I mean, and there's also that contradiction there because at the same time, people of colour and in particular working class people of colour are the engines of, you know, Anglophone pop culture, right, in Britain and America. What do you have left when you don't have people of colour? I mean, don't even have country music because we did that too. Yeah. I mean, David Graeber called Reston, he had a really interesting theory about all this, which was that culture originally comes from people trying to resist civilisation. So the warped culture comes from the early German societies under Friedrich the Great when they're trying to resist the French engines of civilisation. So civilisation starts off as this kind of like hegemonic idea and culture is the thing that resists that. So you can see that sometimes in our culture where you see like the reason it's difficult for me to get the atmosphere of a comedy club onto the BBC, for example, is that comedy clubs are to some extent set up to resist the ideology of the BBC and they're kind of two different competing things. I mean, I think you have an interesting element of co-option on the part of the BBC when it came to pirate radio. So on the one hand you had the BBC being the kind of defensive ball walk against pirate radio and then on the other hand you had them taking all their best DJs, particularly for so-called urban music because they were the only people who were in touch with that scene. Sure and then you have Lenny Henry at the time like being a completely mainstream comedy character in a sitcom as a pirate radio DJ. But then again, as David Mitchell said one time, you've got to think of the BBC more as a warring federation. People think of it as a monolith and if we talk about the things that left could do better in the media, sometimes it's maybe to understand institutions and some of the cross currents that are within them a little better. I mean, so in a sense you're a Gramscian comedian, you're advocating the war of position in establishment institutions. I think I would be if I didn't think it was like a really late point in history. You know, this is where we are. I mean so one of the things that you start the book by saying is that in order to grapple with the future you've got to understand the past and that's something which Britain has never really done. And it seems to me that the collective common sense in this country is that Britain didn't have an empire but if it did it was a very good one and you should be grateful that it abolished slavery and so why do you think it is that unlike countries like Germany we've not been able to deal with the bloodiness of our recent history? I think to some extent it suited us not to. My parents are Irish, they're from Donegal, so I grew up in the whole suppression of Ireland by Britain and one of the things you grow up knowing is that the news isn't true, the news isn't literally true and most British people don't have that. Britain's quite a has a strong streak of conformity in it as a culture that's pushed on people and it has a lot of it's always had a kind of love of the knobs and a love of the elites deeply engraved, it's a culture and a lack of shame about that and even today like if you go that essay at the start where I talk about colonialism and stuff, it was originally an essay for an artist called Rachel McLean, she had a guidebook for her exhibition and I went to research it and get some books on British history and there's just this absolute wall of biographies of Churchill and Nile Fergus and all that kind of stuff and then I was looking for a Carla's book and eventually I found a Carla's book which is like one of the best books about British history in the last 10 years and I found it in the music section and there's a copy there and that's something that I would think of as a big book that's sold really well instead of big empire but compared to like the monoliths of culture that's pushed at people, it's hard to get past that sometimes I mean I think you're right that there's this whole culture industry propping up the sort of idealised version of empire and I was wondering if that's also itself a kind of product of trauma because Britain didn't really disengage from a hierarchy of race and of culture which placed Britain at the top of it and the trauma is that Britain got its arse handed to it by the people it defined as inherently inferior and then it also needed those people to run its welfare state and to provide it with a future after the end of empire. Yeah and I mean also perhaps the continuing situation in Ireland which was for various reasons including that the security services wanted to use it as a kind of training ground and playground really and perhaps that allowed British people to maintain some ideas of empire and then you know Falklands war in the early 80s allowed them to continue that so it's been a really long disengagement from the idea that we were a world power I mean I never learned about Ireland at school ever and most of the time I came to it I think was studying a Brian Frill play dancing at Lunar Sir but there was absolutely no integration of that bit of our history into my educational it's not as if I learnt about the other aspects of empire either it was sort of Tudors question mark question mark question mark Victoria question mark question mark question mark the internet happened and that was my historical education. Where I learnt about these things funnily enough was from my mum and from my grandmother who had a really keen sense of Irish history because there was a sense of that imperial history was our imperial history. Sure and also I mean I had a similar thing with my dad I learnt about American civil rights stuff and he was writing to Martin Luther King and I'd read like Malcolm X his autobiography when he did with Alex Haley I'd read that when I was like 12 or something because they saw that as part of the same imperial history as well although with Irish people it got quite confused and it's kind of like the civil rights movement leads up to John F Kennedy he's like the culmination of all that work to them sometimes I mean I sort of wonder about the extent to which here in the British left we rely on a distinctly American understanding of race at the expense of understanding our own empire and so one of those things is that we think of America's racial hierarchy as our racial hierarchy whereas ours is a lot more kaleidoscopic and a lot more weird and it depends on where your foot is in the empire at any given time to work out what's going to be the sort of salient hierarchy there I mean is that something which you find is perhaps a lack in the left is that we're still so different to America Yeah as you see particularly in the understanding of race there's no excuse for because like you know we're much less racially segregated here and have been historically do you know what I mean I remember being at uni and staying in Hansworth in Birmingham and it just being this pocket of white people who were the students who you know I'm an occasional Asian person who just didn't interact with like all these black people you met every day you know so it's taken an effort well really to not learn about race I mean I always found that that was something really annoying about the studies on residential segregation in this country is that it took really diverse areas like Hansworth or Tottenham and went oh that's a segregated neighbourhood except it's not because you've got West Africans living next door to Caribbean's living next door to Romanians living next door to Siletes it's pretty diverse it never takes to look at like Bath or Harrogate or any of these like very wealthy white mono cultures and goes that's a segregated population. Yeah and coming from Scotland it is pretty much a mono cult well when I was growing up it was a mono culture and it's changed about now I mean much for the better. Who would have believed conspiracy stuff would end up drifting like completely in sync with the alt-right like so when I you know I'm a lot older than you when I started getting into conspiracy stuff in the 90s that was where you first found like alternative information there were these things published the disinformation guides and they got right by like Howard Zinn and you know various kind of like alternative thinkers Noam Chomsky and it's the first place I encountered loads of stuff and it was just an alternative to you know what you've been fed by mainstream media and now it's turned into this they've completely bought into the far right Well I've been thinking about this a lot and one of the things is that alt-right have done very cannily is appropriated the language of minoritarian grievance and have applied it to what were the dominant identitarian signifiers of being white or of being male or being heterosexual and so on and so forth and so I think that's a part of that is that they looked at the way in which the left was able to tell a story of marginality and appropriated it yeah I mean I think there's there's other things going on there so there's an interesting talk James Baldwin does called a rap about race I was listening to again recently and I've forgotten that but he talks in it about Huey Newton has this thing where polarization isn't necessarily a bad thing for them at that point in the civil rights movement this may be 1970, 1969, 1970, polarization isn't necessarily bad because polarization brings people to your door and you know they enter the civil rights movement because you know society's getting very one side or the other whereas now I think for left-wing people polarization often drives them online where they can feel connected without really achieving very much or without making any genuine connection whereas the alt-right are still very focused on recruitment like they're still very focused on how do we get this person into the organization I mean I would agree with that and certainly Twitter provides me with an illusion of agency which probably has got a lot to do with self soothing as much as it does to do with me feeling I'm doing useful communicating but maybe also the reason why the left hasn't necessarily been able to use polarization to catapult itself into office the same way in which the right has is because the right are very clear at the moment they want to destroy liberal democratic institutions whereas the left is more ambivalent about that on the one hand they want to transform these institutions whether that's how parliamentary democracy works or the civil service or the BBC whereas the right just go no we want to destroy this the left sees that those are also homes and bastions of some values that they also share and so they don't know if they want to destroy it or not whereas there's a clarity of purpose of the right it's a very good position on the internet it's very short and very easy to understand you know it's not really about nuance of online communication I think like if I could say something practical I think the trap left when people fall into online is they forget that although they know that people are arguing with them in bad faith a lot of people who are observing the argument don't know that see that quite a lot where people are kind of lured into essentially platforming these people I mean it's that thing of if you wrestle a pig you both get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it yeah and I mean some of those people have to have to get interactions to exist and you see very quickly so I have people like what's he called Lawrence Fox 19th century he'll occasionally dangle his line in my water but if I don't react he's got to move on to the next one really quickly because they need the engagement to survive he sent me an email asking if I'd debate him on his show and my response was well the first response had was I've got coronavirus but I was thinking about it and I was like why don't I want to do this it's not because I think that he'll be hostile I actually think he'll probably be incredibly polite and courteous and all the rest of it because that self demonstrates the point about who's reasonable and who's unreasonable but the reason why I don't want to do it is because I just think I don't want to need you for my political existence I'm not the photo negative of the values that you hold it's actually completely different you know you want a debate in these very narrow identitarian terms and that's how you constitute political meaning but that's not what I want at all it's such a narrow focus that they have things that are in bad faith as well they're not particularly interested in free speech most of them they're not actually classical liberals unless you took a very absolute definition of that in the sense that they don't see anything wrong with the transatlantic slave trade yes classical liberals but if you took the sense that classical liberals didn't really believe in democracy they qualify but they're not really they're authoritarian ultimately I mean so one of the things that I wanted to ask you about the book specifically is that you identify quite a few things as British politics so you talk about you know Brexit you talk about Jeremy Clarkson and all these signifiers of this kind of reaction reimpulse which I think are the sort of dominant mobilizing effect in electoral politics at the moment but how much of that is British and how much of it is England specifically having a nervous breakdown? A lot of it is England and I try and sort of differentiate in the book by having there's kind of like a thousand words or so at the end about Scotland's role in colonialism and its complexity and all that kind of stuff and where that comes from but yeah a lot of it has to do with the kind of end of empire English psyche starting to finally get really pressure tested by reality and it manifests itself in a lot of different horrific cultural ways I mean because you talk about the S&P being like the political wing of the managerial class another way I've heard them described is Blair without the war but they pulled together the kind of electoral coalition that Labour can only dream of so Metropolitan centres you know former industrial heartlands they presented nationalism as a progressive cause and you know they're offering Scottish people way out of a toxic relationship with Westminster and do you think that they are showing the left what they've got to do which is embrace the death of unionism really? Well apparently I mean I would sort of dispute although I'm net pecking really that they've made nationalism progressive and that it's almost not nationalism like I'm not saying that because I'm an S&P voter and I'm not but they have managed to create some kind of brand some kind of civic nationalism that lacks almost any cultural element whatsoever and if you look at similar movements if you look at what happened in Ireland before 1916 or whatever all this stuff is preceded by cultural revival whereas the S&P is a managerial ultimately centrist group that has really no interest in culture it sort of gives them tremendous advantages sometimes so do you remember like there's all this trouble with you know Corbyn supporters online that managed to burst into not just anti-Semitism but a bunch of different scandals over the course of Corbyn's leadership. The S&P had that in the referendum campaign do you remember Cybernats front page news here for maybe three or four days and they just killed it because it was so I mean they just totally disassociated themselves from it and it was so obvious that actually they do dislike the demotic elements of their coalition like it's so obvious that they did want those people to shut up that it kind of killed it as a story so it has certain advantages but I think ultimately I mean their growth commission thing is incredibly right when and probably not going to work. Well I mean I suppose it's a reflection of Westminster politics that a kind of you know Blair right third wayism looks like a lifeline out of authoritarian nationalist populism. I don't think they would like to Blair or something like that really it's more that because of the way the Scottish state came into being and of course the British state came into being that they would see their role in running independent Scotland as being a kind of a version of the British state I think it's sort of more subtle than you know they would probably see themselves more in the line of like centrist European politicians. I mean so I want to move on just a little bit because I've always wanted to talk to you specifically about the politics of comedy and that's something I've wanted to talk to you about even before I've got involved with foreign media because my favourite thing to do is to pick at jokes until not only they're not funny anymore but even thinking about comedy is really unenjoyable and that's because I did literature at uni man I love that stuff. So like one of the things you talk about in the book is that British satire is in this kind of Horatian tradition it's kind of florid it's indirect it's pulling its punches so in a way it's playing by the rules of the courts and I would agree with that but I would also wonder if in saying or equating that more hard-edged juvenileian tradition with straight talking there's a danger in that because you kind of end up thinking that cruelty and crassness is in itself radical anti-establishment. Yeah I mean I don't see people writing in a Horatian style or an elliptical that you know that style which actually comes as much from PG Woodhouse as anything and I don't see them as pulling their punches necessarily you know I think Marina Hyde's very incisive satirist I think David Mitchell can be a very incisive guy who writes columns and you know so I don't think that necessarily means you need to pull stuff it's just that it sort of has ended up being phrased in that way because it feels more comfortable when they feel that only certain people are going to get things. I mean I was going to say really it's a reflection of a class register isn't it and I find myself doing it when I'm writing is that I start doing a kind of Marina Hyde thing because I want it to be recognised as legitimate witty political insight. I mean the rule of class in comedy is very rarely talked about but I think it's notable say like most of the big working class comedians who have like been in the alternative tradition in my tradition they kind of sell themselves as a kind of savant or natural and you know Billy Conley makes it all up, Johnny Vegas makes it all they don't like these are things they have learned. Billy Conley is actually improvising with structure you know which is a cerebral talent but for him to sell himself to Britain is someone with this incredibly intellectual talent really that nobody else has ever really improvised with structure as a stand-up in that way is a really difficult sell so instead it's just a natural gives this funny in the shipments or whatever. I mean so one of the things that I was thinking about in terms of the relationship between politics and comedy is that I think that your comedy has changed and I wonder if that's because the politics of the time has changed you know perhaps today all the material would be criticized for punching down rather than up and do you think that your material has changed because of upswing in you know the politics of racial presentment and a kind of you know men's rights activists you know backlash against feminism and stuff like that. Well various things there first of all I don't really think punching down is a very useful term. I think it's one of those things people say because you know it's caught on because it sounds good. If you think about how these things actually work see there's like a supermarket wants to build some terrible new building beside of your local primary school and you get involved in the campaign against it and all that stuff and all the trouble it's going to cause right. If you were coming to write a satire about that you know as a player and all or whatever you're as well writing about the people that are in the campaign as you are writing about the supermarket because the supermarket like any big corporation has systems of self-criticism you know it has ways of storing self-criticism and learning from it whereas famously most like local engagements most political movements all have to start from the first principles again don't they forget all the lessons that were learned the last time people tried to stop the supermarket from coming so to an extent like that's punching down isn't it you're writing about the people who don't have power I just don't think it's really a kind of serious possession but my stuff has changed partly because it's too late a point in history but it's also odd for me because now people say to me oh I can see what you were getting at I can see what all that nihilism was about and you know and some of the bigger comedians in the world now are doing stuff that was kind of of the tone of the things that I used to do I sort of think we're just far too far along the road for for you know nihilism I mean I might inclined to agree with you that the idea of punching up versus punching down is limited really really limited and I think that the left tries to resolve the contradictions in errant within comedy to try and make it simple not and you've got that really uncomfortable place where the politics of liberal solidarity breaks down and the thing that I always think of is Richard Pryor when he's at the Hollywood Bowl and first he's the only person who's brave enough to talk about what they're all there to talk about which is essentially the defense of gay rights and he's the only person he talks about gay sex and then because of his anger at being treated in a reprehensible way because he's black he sees the way other black artists are being treated he also then uses homophobic slurs and in his defense of himself he says I wanted to test you to your motherfucking soul and so I wonder do you see yourself within that space of you're within these contradictions and you're opening them up rather than closing them down this is like James Baldwin's thing where he says really I think we applied to Richard Pryor which he says the job of the artist is to complicate every battle I quite like but I wouldn't really see myself in that tradition anymore I think I thought I was doing that at the time but now like looking back what bothers me about it is like I had lots of really great anti-war stuff I had lots of really great anti-misogyny stuff I had lots of really great anti-racist stuff I was an anti-racist stuff up here since I was like a teenager and that kind of got buried in a wave of nihilism and kind of like grossed out stuff and it's a lot to ask audiences to unpack that and go oh he's been sincere here when he talks about the Iraq war and then probably this bit about wanting to kill a bunch of celebrities as he went around and you know that's a lot to ask of the crime I suppose that's also that thing of is everyone laughing for the same reason and I think Dave Chappelle talked about this when he was doing a bit for a sketch show which required him to be in blackface and he saw a white member of the crew laughing in a way that made him feel uncomfortable and so I always wonder about comedians and how they think about their own responsibility for the manner in which other people are laughing is that something which you can hold yourself to be responsible for? You can try to be as responsible as you can so I used to like workshop stuff I used to do this place called the Henin Checkings in Islington which I hope will reopen after all this but it's just above a pub where it was like kind of a workshop almost so it stopped and I go you realise there that I'm you know I'm against that character in the joke you realise this is a bit right and I would sort of try and figure out and some stuff would get dropped from there because you're like oh yeah that's working but for maybe the wrong reasons and so on so I mean you've got a responsibility to do that I think I mean I suppose one of the things that I found really interesting about this political moment we're in now is that comedy and the culture of comedy being litigated as a political terrain so you've got this whole thing of on the BBC there are too many left-wing comics and you've got this thing from right-wing comedians where it seems to me that they're constantly hectoring their audience to find them funny and so you've got this kind of culture around certain right-wing comedians where it's the same joke about I identify as a I don't know a fucking computer monitor or whatever and the sense of and if you don't laugh you're amongst this you know evil band of the woke which puts you outside of this audience do you think that there is a possibility for comedy to be a shared political terrain or is it always going to be contested is it always going to be a sort of politically antagonistic space in which you're essentially trying to punch the other side out of their place no I mean I think they do make like they do make shows for right-wing people but they're you know Mrs Brown's boys and you know McIntyre and stuff like that because literally a lot of right-wing people don't think that you should be making jokes about a lot of the subjects they talk about so even like COVID even if you do a joke about Boris Johnson getting COVID you think that be relevant in our society but people are like you shouldn't joke about things like that so the things that are made for right-wing viewers and there's lots of them but they're largely apolitical and I think a lot of those right-wing people are shit but a lot of them when you talk to them they don't want to be on TV so this is a bit of a pose and this is a bit of a kind of early salvo in the culture war because they know that their stuff TV's regulated you know there's an off-con like so some of those people I won't mention their names I don't want to give them the publicity but like if they went and did what they're putting up on their Facebook page or their YouTube channel on the BBC the BBC would get fined like the regulator would step in and an off-con would like find them and like an off-con can like withdraw your license I mean it's a proper regulator it's not like the press so those people aren't actually interested in being on television they're interested in being online and that's what they're really worried about they're worried about people withdrawing their YouTube page or taking their Twitter down or taking away from their ability to monetize incels that's what they're into I mean I want to sort of take this point about new media and what it drives in terms of political cultures and one of the things that you talk about in the book is that conspiracy thinking is an outgrowth of new media and I'd agree with you there in a very big way but I'd also put it down to the fact that there has been a debasement of the public sphere and it's due to and no small part of the behaviour of establishment media outlets themselves and I know you work for the BBC I'm not trying to get you to talk yourself into a redundancy but how do you deal with the fact that there has been a degradation of the public sphere and part of what that's meant is that people seek out more and more marginal outlets in order to deal with a breakdown of trust in legacy outlets First of all I don't know how much trust there should have been in legacy outlets so I can certainly remember growing up not thinking all this reporting is really fair and balanced, terrestrial channels which is what I grew up with. I think you've got to look at the broader degradation of culture which is like the education system being run down austerity running down lots of support systems for people from before that from people being utterly marginalized from mainstream culture from the lack of representation from everybody including the BBC there's a much broader more pervasive degradation of culture than simply news media bias which is there but I think has always been there I think for me my first big memory of the BBC was the run up to the Iraq war I was about 11 then and I remember watching this stuff and feeling that it wasn't true and my feeling of it not being true was probably because my mum was very staunchly anti-war and so the story that I was hearing was something else but do you think that that trust can be rebuilt through perhaps diversifying newsrooms you have people who are from working class backgrounds who are from communities of colour and are telling those stories or do you think it's too far gone? No absolutely I think you can democratize them as well like you can have news teams like the editor and so on you know why not there's all kinds of different things that you could do to try and save those situations but like that you've also got to face up to the fact that these things aren't monoliths and you're like well I don't like that better than news coverage but at the same time I'm not going to throw under the bass the person who did like we were looking through clips for Yemen for the show we're trying to do something about Britain's arms sales to Saudi Arabia and we're like there'll be nothing this isn't covered by the mainstream media but actually the BBC and ITV oddly enough had like three or four brilliant reports about it and that's someone really sticking the neck out and reporting on the ground you know from Yemen to get these things broadcast by these institutions so you know I don't know that it's first time to Saudi Arabia. There's also a sense that the complaints about coverage are sometimes really complaints about audience engagement so there is stuff that's being made about Yemen or there is stuff being made about Syria but there isn't enough audience engagement for there to be you know wall tall coverage of it in the same way that there would be about safe Brexit for instance. Sure and often there isn't enough audience engagement for me to get it on you all the order so when we do in front of a live crowd you've got to be really careful how you build those items to bring the audience along with you because if it really doesn't work it will just end up being you know a five minute bit instead of a 10 minute bit. I mean so how do you do that how do you create that buy-in with an audience with material that they're not necessarily familiar with or invested in. So like in that case for example we might start an item about tech and it might end up being about weapons and it might end up being about British weapons sales and so on and you can bring people on that journey from where they've seen a funny robot to where they've seen a sinister drone to where they're actually getting into some worthwhile politics. But part of part of the frustration of this job which is part of the job is that sometimes you can get two stages along that or you can get one stage along that and you've got the funny robot item and it ends up looking about now but you you know as long as you keep trying you will eventually get some of that stuff out. It's the Samuel Beckett thing with fail better, fail again. Yeah. So also in the book you talk about the Labour Party and what the Labour Party once took for granted the existence of class consciousness and that's been totally eroded and I would perhaps add to that that one of the greatest errors of Corbinism was that it behaved as though hopelessness hadn't already congealed into just outright cruelty amongst those voters that were switching from red to blue and this is a cultural question more than one of political strategy and it's a question of can the left succeed when it's appealing to values that aren't dominant within the electorate anymore. Can you appeal to solidarity when actually one of the motivating factors for people is I don't mind if life is worse as long as it's not a bit better for these people who I deem undeserving? Well I mean if I could answer that in a way that sounds like I'm trying to avoid the question. I think you need to update the concepts I think that's more what it's about. The idea of solidarity to me comes from all kinds of linguistic cues that I would have had so solidarity is when they brought round a box for the minor strike in our school and our teacher said you should give something to this and this is why it explains what's happening with the minors so that's practical solidarity. Now in the online age there's a committee called Joe Wells who said solidarity is now just left-wing thoughts and prayers and we have to reinvent it in some way that it actually practically means something to people in the way that that cup going round meant something. I think that's true of loads and loads of concepts in the left so people talk about virtual packet lines and stuff now and you're like we can't have a virtual packet line because a big point in the packet line was you saw who was crossing the packet and it was a way of knowing what was going on it was data essentially so maybe we need to think of ways of re-creating these concepts in some other way that they would appeal to people and so you see things like now in mutual aid and stuff like that that seem to me like a recreation of practical solidarity. I mean to sort of loop back round to the beginning where we were talking about pessimism and optimism do you think that this is essentially the source of your optimism and belief in the power of human sociality of existing within a network of obligations and responsibilities but also affections and that that's what you appeal to when everything is very shit and that's the seed of resistance. And also the capabilities of people and people are incredible some of the things that people can achieve are amazing and some of the things you know I've known addicts in my life are some of the things that they've achieved which seems surreal if I even stated them so there's all of that and why can't we do that as a society but I think we do have to do that with some message of optimism you do have to offer people particularly coming out COVID whenever that happens you have to offer them a completely different road map that has possibilities inherent in it you know and I think to an extent yes cynicism can undermine that maybe I'm a big part of that cynicism I mean last question then to end on a less cynical note is what's the last thing that made you feel hopeful I get quite regular hope from I used to do a lot of talking to people I mentioned this at the end of the book I used to do a lot of talking to people in my DMs who were like addicts usually alcoholics and referred them to various services but also just talking to them and there's actually something that's a real release in social media where you don't if this conversation goes wrong you don't really have to deal with anything there's no fallout to it you can actually just be honest to people there's no hour of dancing around I think you should go and seek therapy or you should go to an AA or something like that you can just do it and all of those interactions give me a lot of hope but I've noticed that under COVID people have stopped doing that I don't think there's a lot of people trying to give up substances or drink which is pretty sad so there you go I didn't actually have been caught off for after hours I mean you took me on such a journey there you like carried me up and just a drop for me at the end I tell you a good one I did have a guy wrote to me I guess you would call them men's rights activists but I don't think he would have seen himself like that it's like 2021 this guy and he's a student and he had a huge argument with a girl as he described her about feminism I don't think he would have even known to call it feminism but all this new woke rubbish and I did explain to him that he was a misogynist and that it was going to ruin his life I was able to explain to him in detail exactly the ways I'd seen that ruin people's lives and he went and sought help so even for something as abstract as that there are points where we can catch ourselves and go I'm on the wrong path here and maybe as a society we can do that as well but it's hopeful I think sometimes reminding yourself that communication has a point and you're not just screaming into the void it's possible to connect with people in a way which fulfills their emotional needs in quite a profound way that's hopeful so I reckon that's a good note to end it on before you say anything which drives me into despair ha ha ha