Knowledge and Nostalgia: Why a University Education Should Be Free (Louisa Munch)

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Hello, it's Amol here. Welcome to Radical Conversations about the deep global trends changing our world and offering you some pretty radical ideas for the future. This week, what is the point of going to university? Is it for everyone? Who should go and how should it be paid for? Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, Tony Blair, remember him, was a Labour leader who said half of young adults should go into higher education. And you know what? By 2016, that year of...

Brexit and Trump, they basically hit that target. But Keir Starmer, a very different Labour leader, thinks that that target is no longer right for our times. He wants a much greater focus and emphasis on technical qualifications and apprenticeships. And of course, all of this as listeners to Radical will know, is rather salient in the age of AI, given it's certain. In fact, we can already see that artificial intelligence is replacing lots of entry-level...

white collar jobs. But in terms of politics, this is a really big and significant shift in tone from a Labour Prime Minister because it puts more emphasis on equipping people with the necessary skills for work, whatever those skills may be. However... My guest today, who is on the left of politics, who is a fascinating thinker and who has grown a really big following on social media.

thinks that people should be encouraged to go to university, not because it might get them a job, but because it will give them the intellectual and theoretical skills which they need to apply in the world. It will give them a sense of agency and power.

over their lives she is louisa munch a young academic based at warwick university a social media influencer in the intellectual sense of that term who's built a big following by applying critical theory and by the way if you don't know what that is don't worry we're going to explain it very very shortly to the political issues of the day i think you're going to enjoy this thank you so much for coming in i thought we should start

Right. By me, A, confessing that I've spent more time looking at videos of you talking about critical theory than almost anything else that I've done in my life for the past month since you said yes to coming on this podcast. But also with your... What do you think about higher education? Because people tuning into this will be aware, because I've told them that you are an academic and you really believe in university at a time when some people don't. Why do you believe in university?

I think it's one of the very few spaces that we have left that's protected for questioning power. There's not a lot of places, I think, that is left where we can do that. And the university... It's about ideas, it's about thinking of something new. I think one of the biggest problems we have in society is imagining something different.

You know, everybody knows something's not quite right, but we can't think of an alternative. And I think, you know, the university is a place where that's what it's all about. I always tell my students, like, I don't... care what you get in the essay like you know if you if you come out with 100 if you come out with 50 whatever like what i care about is they go into the world and they can

act upon the world you know they feel like they have some sort of power they can call agency exactly exactly it's all about agency and you equip them with that power through something called critical theory

What is critical theory? Well, to put it in like, I don't know, the dictionary definition, it's like the critique of ideology. So what I think of it... more as is like the critique of power so calling uh power into question ideology is a way of thinking that aims at power yeah yeah and it's it's not like a passive thing critical theory i think People think of theory as this, like, you know, it's a passive sort of everybody's...

like philosophers sat around in rooms just like mulling over things and feeling smart like it's about change it's about creating social change you know it has a very uh sort of it has a goal and I think that's what I find really empowering about it. And so you want more people to go to university or you want more people to be engaged with critical theory at least or to learn the art of critical thinking?

yeah critical thinking that's what your social media content which is very addictive is about do you think university should be free absolutely i think it's ridiculous that you have to pay for it like I always say in my videos, we can't have a democracy without informed citizens. We can't have a democracy if you don't have citizens that can critically think, you know. And like, we're in the BBC, you know, this is about journalism.

The whole thing recently has been about not having a bias, isn't it? And to give people objective information assumes they can think critically about it. But this is not something that we're teaching people. So we have to think of something. I think universities are the one place where you are taught to think critically. I know that's where I learned it. And it's kind of weird. I felt like before...

I'd been to university. I was living in kind of like the Truman Show. What do you mean? Because we take so much... for granted we don't question a lot of things and I didn't seem to question a lot of things I think one module in particular I went to Liverpool John Moores University. And you're now based at Warwick, I should say. Yeah. And... In my final year, I didn't know what to do. I was working in marketing in Manchester. I was a copywriter. I like writing. I like creating things.

There was just some sort of like feeling that I got that was like, I don't think I can do this forever. And I did a module called Capital on the Markets. And I was like... oh my god I can't stay in marketing anymore I need to change something yeah yeah it really is that and I think a lot of people will talk about university in that way you know this sort of awakening and especially when you come from like

kind of a working class background or you don't have like you don't grow up in a political household as such or you know you don't grow up in a household where you talk about I don't know philosophers or literature and things like that then it's It is really a life-changing experience. There is so much I want to talk to you about. What was the nature of that awakening? So there's Louisa Munch. How old were you when you do this Capitalism in the Markets module?

It was just before COVID, so like 20. So you're 20 years old. You're reading this stuff about capitalism and markets. Did you have this sudden feeling that kind of like... everything sort of made sense it fitted into place or this sort of sudden realization that maybe what you've been told or grew up believing grew up believing was a lie yeah it wasn't um The fact that everything made sense. It was everything doesn't make sense. Exactly.

Nothing makes sense. Like, what do you mean I'm on a planet where you work 40 hours a week until you're 70 just to buy things and then you die? put me somewhere else. I thought I can't do this. You know, I just, it was like so invigorating. I read one of the books that was on the module was Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.

And that is, it was such a life-changing text for me. He's got the idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Yeah, and that idea changed my life. I thought, why can't we... imagine an alternative to this i i'm not enjoying myself you know so before we get into that alternative what it might look like and then the munch um are you gonna go into politics one day by the way

I am in politics. You are in politics. Educating the people. Would you go into democratic politics, legislative politics? You mean like party politics? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I love educating. I love teaching. There's nothing I enjoy more than speaking to people and teaching them. And I think with the state that politics is in now, it's not. Not particularly attractive, yeah. And there's other downsides, like it completely...

destroys your family and private life and all of that sort of thing, or so I'm told. Just on education, right? So we should acknowledge the fact that in Scotland, higher education is free. It's subsidised by the general taxpayer. And what you're saying about it being universally available, it's amazing to think that...

Even 25, 30 years ago in this country, it was, you know, free. It was funded through general taxation. And then something changed. It happened a bit, I think, started under the Blair government. And it's amazing. Do you know, last year... tuition fees in England and Wales rose. They were raised really quite substantially.

And I wondered, we've had Nick Clegg on this podcast, and Nick Clegg, way back in 2010-11, there were literally riots where people, when tuition fees were going up, and that was partly because Nick Clegg had said before that he was against a rise in tuition fees, and there was this feeling that he'd sold out.

when tuition fees rose under the coalition government, people gave him a lot of hard time. I wondered what Nick Clegg would have made of the fact that, you know, the Labour government rose, you know, made tuition fees even higher.

And there was kind of not a pip of protest. So the idea of university being free is actually quite radical now, isn't it? It's actually quite a kind of... No one's really advocating that. Maybe the Greens are. I don't know what Zach Polanski thinks. But the idea that university should be free...

is not where the consensus is in British politics. I think it's crazy. I've sort of always grown up. I felt like on the fringes of something. So obviously my dad's Danish. I've spent a lot of time in Denmark where it is... It's not just free, it's funded. You get paid to go to university. Even when I go to conferences in Europe, people cannot believe that we pay. When I say I'm doing a PhD and I've paid for just the PhD alone...

30 grand uh people are like you're paying to research on behalf of the university and i'm like yeah You know, it's all made into this personal investment. And I think you really see it in the students as well because they really take on this idea that their education is a personal investment. They're their customers.

Exactly. And they want, you know, the most out of their product. But the product isn't, you know, and the way that they care so much about the grade as well worries me so much because that's not what it's about. It's like this, not to use... these sort of terms but like the neoliberalization of university you know it's a financial the financialization of it it's something that you buy and you get uh sort of

inequity from or whatever and i think that's a huge problem because that is not what education is about what is education about freedom it's about freedom

It's about being able to have an impact on the world, feeling empowered, calling things into question. And we have school. We think it's morally right to send all children to school, but why does education then end at... at 18 or whatever. But when you say you are sceptical about why people are obsessed with a grade, isn't there something quite admirable about...

being obsessed with grades and standards and trying to be the best, trying to get a 2-1 instead of a 2-2 or trying to get a first instead of a 2-1. Isn't there something important about children aspiring to higher standards? Or young people, not just children. I think this age of competitiveness isn't helpful. And it also, you know, I've never known... classism until I've got to university there is such a stark contrast between those students that have grown up in households that

have had this kind of ability to think critically. They've sat around the table and been asked political questions and asked what they really think about something and made to feel like, you know, their opinion really matters. And then the kids that haven't had that.

And I think this idea of, like, education is a meritocracy and that, you know, if you just work hard, you'll do well. Like, it is unhelpful and it just pits other students against each other. And I just... in the classroom i always say like i'm not above you you know i might have read more than you but if you want to challenge my view please do like we can have a debate and i think

That's the most important thing about, you know, university is it's a space for debate. It's a space for challenge. It's not a space for competition and, you know, getting some sort of... number on a page at the end of it do you think universities are in a healthy place on that front because there's two there's a lot of people and i'm obsessed with universities i'm married to an academic

present a program that's got the word university in it. University changed my life. There's a lot of people say we've got two big, big challenges. One is there's a bunch of very specific financial challenges facing a lot of institutions that are basically about to go under. Some of them have gone under whole departments, whole universities.

have shut in recent years and there's another which is there's a feeling that a kind of spirit of intolerance or censorship has spread across campuses in this country and maybe on the other side of the Atlantic and the culture wars have come for university and it's harder to have that kind of open critical thought and debate than it used to be. What's your sense on that?

To be honest, I'm quite lucky I haven't experienced that kind of... Warwick is really good for allowing, like, a very wide range of opinions. I know, you know, probably more, like, conservative leading academics. I know people who have more left... wing than me so I think a lot of the wokeism of university and the culture wars is a lot to do with the media and a lot to it's a story kind of like

you know, this is the reason why you don't want to get into it. It's too cutthroat and it's too critical. But, I mean, critical theory and critical thinking... is about critique. It's about challenge. It's about question. It's about holding, you know, ideas to account.

I've, you know, you can change your mind again and again and again. And like, there's no shame in that. Like I've changed my viewpoints over and over again. My student might say something and I'll be like, oh my God, I never thought of that. That's so true. And actually that's something.

Wonderful. It's wonderful changing your mind. And if you could just have the courage to... forego and forfeit something you thought of before to let go of it and to be open to challenge actually that's one of the wonderful things because you don't know all the answers right and it's nice to be it's nice to be challenged on your thing about education being free I wonder what The argument against education being free is if the benefit of...

Okay, first of all, if you've got a time of tight finances, huge strain on lots and lots of different public services, and where you spend your money, the government spends around a trillion pounds a year, those are choices that you make as a society and as a government, which is democratically elected.

If the benefit of university goes primarily to the people who receive that education, why should the general taxpayer, why should the people you grew up with in Rochdale fund a benefit? Fund through public taxation a benefit which is mostly privatised. Because it doesn't just benefit the person that gets the degree. Doesn't it primarily benefit them?

Well, what is benefit? You know, you have to define what benefit is here. Is it the job that they're going to get? Because there isn't a graduate premium anymore. We know that. So even that idea is like, right, so there's no economic benefit necessarily. People I know my age have bought houses that haven't inherited money are people who've had apprenticeships from being 14 years old. So there isn't really an economic benefit here. The benefit is about democracy. It's about...

having ideas about thinking, it's about autonomy, it's about agency. You know, I look at like places like France where, you know, they protest if... like anything happens don't they they're out on the streets not the bins aren't getting taken if like the government says right we're pushing the pension age up six months no you're not you know because that sort of

agency that people have, you know, we're not going to lie down and let this happen. We have control. And I think that is one of the most important benefits of education. It's about our public domain, isn't it? It's about the social value that accrues to everyone.

a lot of people have intellectual confidence and the ability to really participate in a democracy. It's so interesting you said it because you also mentioned the decline in graduate premium. And what I think is quite... interesting and kind of counterintuitive dare i say it radical about what you say about education is

A lot of people are going to university because they think it will help them get a particular job. And the graduate premium, which is the increase in the amount of salary you might earn because you went to university, has been falling very steadily for a long time. It's now almost completely disappeared. disappeared from lots of different courses. And so increasingly, people are thinking maybe I should A, not go to university, or B, do an apprenticeship instead.

what do you think because you said earlier you think it's good for lots of people to go to university would you defend the idea of going to university to people listening to this now even if it meant they got into lots of debt because it gives them through critical thought the kind of mental intellectual equipment with which to have agency in the world. Well, I'm living example of this. You know, I'm in a hundred grand's worth of student debt. You're in a hundred grand debt.

Yeah. And it's still going up because I've still got another six months to pay. So yeah, I'm saddled with that. And I have no regrets. You're in a hundred grand of debt. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll probably never pay that back, realistically. But I don't see it as a debt. Like, I would make it, you know, I'd be happy for it to be 200 grand or a million pounds because what I've gained from it is priceless, you know? And...

I think the feeling that, you know, we can change things and that you have, you know, autonomy. And that's what it's about. It's having... a language in which to name things you know name oppression name what you can see is happening because so many people now are like

There is so much noise, there is so much conversation, especially from the far right. People want to know. People want to know why everything feels rubbish. And why we're on the edge of something but we don't quite know what it is. How do you feel?

about, because this gets us into nostalgia, which is one of your great interests and what your PhD was about. How do you feel about the fact that 25, 30 years ago, so, you know, the blink of an eye in the history of a society, people who were, you know, the younger Louisa...

Munches from Rochdale, who went to university, who grew up without a huge amount of money, but were really interested in ideas, could do what you've done and not have any debt. And yet here you are, this public figure, this academic. someone with huge cognitive credentials and you're in over 100 grand of debt. Don't you think that's a bit sort of, doesn't that make you, dare I say it, nostalgic? It makes me angry. Makes you angry.

Yeah, it makes me... That's right, it's incredibly unfair. Yeah, it's frustrating because like... You know, I inhabit two completely different worlds. I go to Warwick and I teach these incredible students. I have so many ideas and, you know, it's great. I love it. And I come home and, like, there are roundabouts. with flags all over the street at the end, where we live. And it's just like this huge gap in knowledge and in...

The feeling of power, you know, the feeling of power at Warwick is being able to challenge ideas and understand and ask the next question and ask the next question and ask the next question. In Rochdale, the power... is about blaming someone. And I think it's so frustrating to me because I think, you know... That feeling is, the feeling is correct. People who do want to blame immigrants or, you know, like, endorse Nigel Farage and stuff like that, and they feel angry about...

that we're getting poorer, and those are all things they should be angry about. It's just the way of thinking is the issue, you know, and that's... That's what I'm trying to give people is a way of thinking critically. A lot of people who have these kind of dual existences between kind of where they grew up and where they may be.

they achieve a certain credential and they achieve a certain status and they leave to go to a residential university or they teach somewhere else. A lot of people have quite mixed... emotions about it because they feel perhaps caught between two very different identities or they feel a sense of betrayal. How do you navigate the fact that you've got this life in Rochdale?

And then you've also got this life in Warwick. How do you cope with that? Oh, my God. If you asked anybody, my family, they would know how much I struggle with this. Even my supervisor. There's been so many times where I've thought, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. What can't you do? I can't go between these worlds. I can't exist in both worlds. It's so...

It's so fragmenting. It's so alienating. And that road, that M6, I travel up and down twice a week. It feels like I'm traveling from one end of the universe to the other.

It really does. And it's... That's the reality of it. And, like, that's how it feels inside me a lot of the time is, like, I am... having to get myself like I've had two weeks off and now I'm like right okay come on Louisa academic mode you know start using big words again because at home I'm not going to do that if I was it becomes very very lonely

If you can't find a language to speak to these two different worlds. But it's interesting you'd call it a struggle because it is like two very different... It's not you're the same person, but you bring... You kind of almost elevate different aspects of yourself in these two different places. But you don't...

Yeah, you don't at all feel when you go back to Rochdale, God, I want to get out of this place. You know, in both spaces, I've realised I can't just exist in one anymore either. You know, I can't... go home and stay in Rochdale and just go back to the marketing job. I knew that when I finished university. I can't do that. But I know when I spend enough time in Warwick...

I can't stay here. I need to go home and I need to, you know, sit in a pub and talk about the football or something. Because, you know, I think one thing about the whole idea of like selling out, it's... I think the problem that happens there when people do inhabit a different world and go home, they don't look across, they look down. I think that is such a big issue.

If you do have some sort of social mobility, a lot of people will return and look down on the people that they've left behind. And I'd like, I can't do that. I just, you know, these people aren't. I don't even like to talk about education as making you smarter, to be honest, because it's not about intelligence in this way that we think of it. It's just more of like... the critique, you know, the questioning. You mentioned the idea of meritocracy earlier. And one of the big kind of, kind of...

intellectual movements of recent years is to say the reason we had Brexit, the reason we had Trump is because the idea of the meritocracy kind of overreached. And I've mentioned before in this podcast that meritocracy is an incredibly interesting idea because the guy who coined it, a guy called Michael Young, who wrote the Labour Manifesto.

in 1945 and he founded the Open University he meant he invented he didn't invent the word but he used it as a in a satirical sense to warn against the meritocracy he said that the idea and it's amazing you read the rise of the meritocracy which I think was published in 1957 think he warns about how by the year 2030 there were these

there'll be these people called the populists and he says it's a terrible idea to split society in two between the clever people and the not so clever people and to say to the not so clever people you deserve your place at the bottom and there's been lots of very interesting

actually ironically very intellectual kind of critiques of meritocracy would you go along with that idea that the problem with meritocracy is not so much that it didn't deliver what it set out to which is a society based on merit but that it's intrinsically dangerous to split society according to clever and not clever and make the bottom half feel stupid yeah i think that's a massive issue you know that's why we have people that you know like donald trump

he has said I love the uneducated I think that's the most I think that's the most four most important words he ever said not make America great again but I love uneducated people yeah because what does that say you know he loves The thing is, when you don't have the ability or the tools to think critically about political issues, but you know that there's something wrong, you know?

then you will go towards leaders. And if you feel weak, you'll go towards leaders that just simply make you feel strong. You know, that's why we've got this like big wave of strongman leaders. And I think that's a huge problem because... They are just filling in for another emotion. They're not actually going to do anything. You know, they're not going to change anything because why would they?

They exploit grievances rather than actually provide answers to them. Let's talk about your ideas then and those flags. Why did you do a PhD on the idea of nostalgia? Well, during Brexit...

Once again, I felt this like huge sort of split because I'm half Danish and I thought I was really confused by the fact that... I was half in and half out, you know? I was just enough, but not quite enough. And it... It was a personal experience. It felt like a personal attack, really. Did Rochdale vote Brexit? Sorry, I forgot. I can't remember. Yeah, I'm not sure, to be honest. Okay, okay. So go on, yeah. And...

All this narrative about taking back our borders, you know. Take back control. Take back control, yeah. And I'm thinking, like, what is this, like, return? What is wrong with the future? That is the politics of nostalgia. If you can't think of... a decent future ahead of you you're going to return to the past it is an interesting fact about nostalgia in the past isn't it that the power of the past has been more

has tended to be deployed pretty effectively by people on the right, and particularly the nationalist right. So... Take back control was a kind of Dominic Cummings idea, which is very, very powerful. Make America great again is Donald Trump. It's also with Vladimir Putin. It's amazing. There's a guy called Timothy Snyder, who's the world's kind of expert on Ukraine.

And he's written lots and lots of books on Ukraine. He wrote an essay for the FT weekend a few weeks ago about how Putin's entire... narrative about Ukraine is based on these sort of ancient mythical texts. He read almost as if they were literal history, but in fact, they're mythical texts about how Ukraine, the ancestral lands of Ukraine, are actually part of Russia. And if you ever had the misfortune...

to watch this excruciating three-hour exchange between a guy called Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. When Tucker Carlson left Fox, he went and sat, I think, in the Kremlin with Putin. And it was just the weirdest experience because in Russian...

Putin just lectured him about history. Why is it that the power of nostalgia has tended to be more effectively deployed by the right? Why is the right so good at effecting that for electoral purposes? Well... I mean, nostalgia has always been used by fascist leaders. Always. It's like the one tool that seems to work. Hitler, flood and soil, return to the fatherland. You know, it's always a mythical return. And I think it works particularly for the right because it's...

It's a return to a kind of harmony, you know, of this, of some sort of racial purity or, you know, it's... That social order. Yeah, exactly. And... When people feel weak and they feel unstable, the economy feels unstable, then it's a natural emotion if you feel vulnerable to look back.

on the past you know even childhood everybody seemed you know we we look back with rose tinted glasses and the thing is with nostalgia it's a fantasy you know that's that's the main problem with it is you know it's it's not a true remembering of history it's

It's the lost home, but it's not real. It comes from the Greek nostalgia for homesickness, doesn't it? It's a sense that you kind of, you literally, and it's interesting because a lot of the people, in fact, one of the earliest guests that we had on this podcast. was a guy called James Orr, who's one of the big sort of intellectual figures in the...

nationalist, conservative right. He's a sort of advisor, I think, to reform. He runs something called the Centre for a Better Britain. And he said that his politics was about a politics of home. And actually, that's one of Kemi Badenoch's big lines, which is she says that a country is a home, not a home. hotel somehow this feeling of a homesickness it's just been

It's been a fundamental aspect of nationalist conservatism for a while, hasn't it? But also, isn't nostalgia bittersweet? And the danger is that you get the sweetness for something that's gone. Yeah.

But you just feel bitter about the fact that it's gone and not here now. Yeah. And that's why it works so well. You know, it encompasses both of those emotions. It encompasses the feeling of, you know... hatred towards another group that's the bitterness the loss you know you can channel that somewhere and then you can use that sweetness of the idea of home you know I think it's

it's so in my phd isn't just about nostalgia in this like really theoretical way it's actually called neo-nostalgia because it's about neoliberalism and nostalgia it's about why now Why do we feel like this now? And it's about loss. That's exactly where nostalgia comes from. It's loss. This is what I wanted to say. If I could, in the spirit of your Warwick seminars, which you feel kind of...

slightly torn between your Rochdale self and your Warwick self there. I just wanted to challenge that for a second because isn't there a sense in which nostalgia is rational? In this country... So I feel really conflicted about this because I've watched your videos and I was so persuaded by and compelled by a lot of what they said. But I've also got this particular thing. I'll just be really transparent about it. One of the...

enormous pleasures and privileges of my working life at the Beeb is that I've interviewed a lot of kind of icons who are people in their 70s now who came of age in the 1960s. And when I read about the 60s, which I wasn't around for because I was born in 1983, I sort of think... What a time to be young in Britain. And obviously, obviously, obviously...

there was a huge amount of terrible stuff going on in the 60s. By the way, homosexuality was illegal until I think 1967. Lots of people who were poor and lived terrible, terrible lives completely forgotten by mainstream culture. But you know what? In other ways, the 1960s, maybe 70s, maybe 1980s.

were pretty cool. They had 3% growth. They had six or seven workers per retiree. They had incredible music and the Beatles. If you were poor in the 1960s, you belonged to the working class. And the working class had certain compensations.

I'm not saying this in a patronising way, but compensations and constellations, which the modern poor don't have. They had trade union membership, membership of great institutions that loved them for who they are. They had roots. And by the way, they had social mobility, which we don't have anymore. Isn't it true that... nostalgia in britain when we've had two lost decades

And when you think about what happened in this country in the 60s, 70s and 80s, isn't nostalgia rational? Because there has been a sense of loss. Yeah, of course it's rational. Oh, damn. I thought you were going to say no, it's irrational and we shouldn't have it. No, because at this time, there was also 95% tax rate. You know, we can look at it. We can say, oh, the past was better. Okay, why?

yeah so we need to ask what the next question is we can't just say okay the past was better because there was more white people that's the problem you know you can it's called historical materialism in in theory you know you you look at the past in a way that is about remembering and it's about critique. We are always in this gap between the future and the past and you have to stand steadfast in this ability to call things into question. You have to constantly be...

Asking... and recontextualizing the moment you know that's why we see uh people like pull down statues and all that kind of stuff you know that is kind of like historical material materialism it's like okay this doesn't belong in our present time let's change it and

That is how we need to look at the past. Why has the left in this country today been, I think I can say this impartially, been less than effective at really articulating an exciting vision of the future? I think... It's... Well, we've had like... At the left, I should... Actually, do you know what? Just before I let you answer, sorry. I should...

caveat that because the left is not one thing. I'm really talking about, sorry, do you know what? I should be specific. I'm talking about Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party because there's other parts of the left. Jeremy Corbyn's got a new party, I think. Zach Polanski's got the Greens. They would say they're big on... the future. So I'm really talking about the Labour Party here. Sorry. Well, I think it's interesting that you rephrase that because...

Like you said, it's all fragmented. And what does Nigel Farage do? He unifies the anger. He funnels it the same way that Donald Trump will say... he's speaking for the working class you know all he's done is get hold of that anger we call it in like psychoanalysis and theory like the death drive this feeling of oppression that needs some place to get out

And it will always take the path of least resistance. It's like a current, you know. So it will, if you say, oh, it's this person over there that doesn't look like you and doesn't speak like you, doesn't wear clothes like you. it will go to there that's a very easy jump to me it's a lot harder to think critically and ask questions and ask questions because that takes time it takes effort it takes somebody to teach you how to do that and that's a lot of things people don't have these days

Isn't it also about telling a story about where you want to get to, right? If I think of the three, I think, I mean, not quite in my lifetime, but the three most electorally successful... figures in America or Britain on the left that I can remember. In this country it was Wilson and then Blair. In America it was Obama. Wilson gave a speech at the...

Labour Party conference, I think in Scarborough, I can't remember the year, 63 maybe, where he talked about the white heat of technology. He evoked this idea that there was this incredible moment in modern history and that Britain should be on the right side of it. Tony Blair was all about, you know, a new dawn has broken.

has it not Obama hope and change I remember you know as a 25 year old being so interested in the Obama phenomenon that I went out to Chicago to watch him get elected on election night I can't it does feel to me like the great hole in British politics

Though maybe some people would say Nigel Farage is filling it. I don't think you would. Some people say Zach Polanski is filling it. It does seem to me like the hopey changey stuff, as Sarah Palin called it, is the great vacancy. Why is there not, why is no one talking more excitedly about the future?

Because we live in an age of disenchantment. We live in this age of nihilism, I think. If you talk to most people my age, I'm Gen Z, so... we have this there's all sorts of like cultural um wording for it like quiet quitting you know people going to work and doing nothing because like what's the point you know and there is

There's no real hope in, like, social mobility. Everybody knows everything's rubbish. And, you know, no one is going anywhere. And it feels like there is a kind of, I don't know, like a giving up. something and I think it's That comes down to this inability to understand what's going on. You know, if you can't point to the oppression or point to the problem, you can't do anything about it. And all those emotions, all those feelings just sort of move around and they get...

placed on blame and all these other places. And I think... That's the problem with sort of like the economy. It's so mystified for people. We need to demystify these sort of things because that's where empowerment comes from is being able to understand it and question it. So where do you think we are as a country? You say Gen Z, what does that mean?

for people who don't know what that means. How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I'm 26. So where do you think we are as a country? If historians look back on this moment, post-financial crash, pre-something else, what... What do you think sort of defines the zeitgeist and where Britain is in the year 2026? Well, I think...

You know, we've had this age of neoliberalism since the 1970s, since Margaret Thatcher. We live in the age of Margaret Thatcher. And in 2008, neoliberalism... crashed it died you know it was over and everybody knew it you know and even i remember like feeling like some i was eight years old at this point but i knew In my house, there was something not right. Like...

We were having conversations about, well, mum can't shop at Tesco anymore. She's going to have to go Aldi. And we were having assemblies in school about what a credit crunch meant and why we might not get many presents at Christmas and things like that. So it had a real... feeling of the end of something, but there was no ideas left to pick up.

you know so we're living in like the end times of neoliberalism the the sort of like zombified neoliberalism that's still walking around dragging us along and we're like we're not going anywhere this it does feel nihilistic because there is no plan, you know? We're just insisting, year on year, it'll get better. That's what Keir Starmer keeps saying, doesn't it?

It'll get better, it'll get better. We're not seeing it. So we're living in the embers of something. Are we also living on the edge of something? Do you feel like we're kind of on the brink of, maybe it's something that's very bad, maybe it's something that potentially could be good, but on the brink of an entirely new chapter because the old order can't be sustained anymore? It reminds me of this really nice quote that...

This guy called Gramsci said he wrote... Guy called Gramsci. We know who Gramsci is in here. Antonio Gramsci, the old march through the institutions. I spent half my youth reading Gramsci. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, anyway, yeah. I think I thought it was Gramsci. at the time yeah I said Gramsci on my uh on my TikTok and everyone's like it's not like that but um yeah and he says uh we live there is this time of interregnum he calls it doesn't it it's like um

The future hasn't been born and the past hasn't quite died and now is the time for monsters. Exactly. And I think, look around us, that's exactly what it looked like. And we know what won last time. So we need to be incredibly vigilant. What one last time? Fascism. That's what happened. You know, he lived in the interwar period.

He was in prison. He wrote them prison notebooks in the interwar period. But you think we're on the brink of fascism, right? Britain in 2026 feels to you like it's a country on the brink of fascism. Yeah. Why? You know, I did this... PhD. I started it in 2022. And at that time, it felt a little bit better because Biden was in, you know.

Labour were going to win the election. I was like, okay, maybe things are going to start to calm down. And my entire PhD is just critical theory. I am just bringing theorists into conversation. who wrote about a similar time to us, the interwar period, you know, and they've wrote this after the war, you know, so like Hannah Aran and Adorno. And... They are begging us to be vigilant about the present and question things about the past and what's being said and not allow this to happen again.

I can't not read what people like Hannah Iran or people like Walter Benjamin were saying and not feel absolutely like... anxiety you know fear that this is what they warned about happening and this is what they they wrote they wrote this to ensure we didn't do this again and you know like everybody always says you know it doesn't start with bloody marching

army boots and stuff what is the greatest story to turn to kind of the positive bits maybe your kind of radical ideas what is the better story that the left should be telling in this country and Do you find yourself, when thinking about the future and how the left can create a positive vision of the future, do you find yourself not harking back to the past, but looking back to...

the tradition to the left and socialism as a way of describing that better future. In other words, do we need better versions of old ideas or do we need new ideas? I mean, there's always this big debate, in theory, about whether we should... think of something new we should go back like I always think it's really interesting the left's nostalgia is always about struggle and the right's is always about harmony I think that's so interesting I think what unites the left's nostalgia for struggle

with the rights nostalgia for harmony and home is a sense of connection and membership. And I think that the biggest, my personal obsession, and I say all this mindful of my duty to be impartial, is that in the... collapse of the old working class and its replacement with a new... alienated poor, to use a Marxist or Hegelian term. But what we have now is an alienated poor, a precariat, the bottom 10%, who don't have any of the old constellations and connections of the working class.

And I feel like there's something interesting there, which is that struggle and harmony are all about this desire for connection and unity and membership of some greater whole. I think... That sort of comes from, well, it comes from loss. You know, we wouldn't feel so nostalgic if we hadn't lost something, if we thought we were going somewhere. People don't feel nostalgic when things are going well. And...

We have lost home. We have lost this sense of home. That is undeniable. And it's not this idea of necessarily home in... sense of the nation even though that is an extremely appealing idea and that's exactly where nationalism comes from and that's what's being utilized by the far right but a sense of home in community you know we've got this loneliness epidemic we've got

social media that makes us it seems to be lying to us in this way you know it's meant to make us feel connected but it makes us feel you know the least connected ever so these sort of like contradictions these paradoxes that we're being served something that doesn't quite fulfill us every single time this like loss of i mean we are social creatures you know that that is

what we're that's how we survive that's what you know we we can do and the whole idea of like it takes a village and all these sort of we have moved neoliberalism has created an individualist society like this was always going to happen you know and that's why i have such an issue with like my students competing for grades because it's like it's not about competition it's not about the individual you know

in that class classroom we are a group you know we're all on the same level and we're all here to challenge power because I these hierarchies and you know these even like social mobility and Everybody needs to be an entrepreneur now. Diary of a CEO podcast and all that kind of stuff. I think it's so unhelpful. You know, we are... social creatures we need to work together and that feels like a radical idea when we have such an individualist society

I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Louisa Munch, at least half as much as I am, because it's a cracker. If you are, please do us a favour and subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way... You won't miss future episodes. If you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never, ever miss out. Thank you. And now, back. to Louisa Munch.

What's a better future look like? What do you want to see, including the radical ideas you'd like to see in the public domain that you think people could get behind? What does a kind of more positive left vision for Britain look like in the late... 2020s and early 2030s? Well, you know, one of the one things I want is free education. I want people to think about education as this thing that you do.

all your life you know you're always learning i want there to be i just want this i just want there to be more socialism to be honest like i want more public libraries i want People to be able to get... I want everything that the... People on the far right want, yeah? I want...

People to be able to get an appointment at the NHS. I want people to be able to send the kids to school and not worry about it. I want people to not worry about buying food in shops. You know, I want people to not worry about the pensions and how they're going to afford a house. I want... people to have access to services and to basic human necessities.

that are free or that are publicly funded. I just think like we've been on this planet long enough now that we can ensure that humans... have rights you know humans have basic needs met like housing healthcare education you know things like that i i don't think it's i think it's such a simple idea but people

i i don't you know it's being twisted into all these other different kinds of narratives and i think just getting it back to the basic fundamental questions that's what critical thinking is about and i think if you do Ask if you have mates or friends or family members that do support reform. Ask them what they want because, really, I think we do all want the same thing. But it's interesting. Can I just ask you funny if you can help me understand something, which is...

the divide between the way which young men are leaning towards reform and young women are leaning more left. There's a really interesting piece by a really smart poster called Scarlett Maguire in the New Statesman this week. And she talked about the sudden...

divergence between young men and young women so she said in the previous decades young women were actually more likely to vote conservative than men however this trend started reversing in 2015 primarily driven by the younger end of the electorate

In 2019, 18 to 25-year-old women voted for Jeremy Corbyn at more than double the rate of the general population. And it's really interesting. So it goes on, many have noted at the last general election, young, that's 18 to 24-year-old men, were twice as... as young women to vote reform while young women were twice as likely to vote green as young men what do you think's going on there the fact is with when

You've always been sort of, you know, you've had a birthright to being okay, you know, to being above. You know, we live in a patriarchal society. Men tend to be above women in this society. Equality feels like oppression.

so what you will do in those scenarios and as well you know in terms of like economic crisis instability men will dig their heels down into older social conventions because they are useful to them you know obviously this whole idea of like women stay at home and oppressing women is uh quite useful if you want to

you know be economically stable you know because somebody will be at home doing the unpaid labor so i think that's what's going on kind of like whether they consciously know this or not and it also feels you know Old social conventions always feel like a safe retreat a lot of the time. Because we can be nostalgic about them. Yeah, and nostalgia is the sweetness is the fact you know how it turned out.

You know, you know, everything was OK in the end, which is kind of like a safe feeling. It's a safe distance as well. What about why women are leaning to the left? I think that's probably a lot. Yeah, I think that's probably a lot to do with like.

more women are going to university now, more women. And I think, again, it's like, you can name your oppression. If you are more educated, you can say, right, okay, I understand feminism. And it's a matter of survival, I think, for a lot of women, you know. I'm 26 and I've had my fair share of being treated badly by men and having that awakening and thinking, you know, this is probably the first time or first, last...

couple of decades where I can actually do something about it. You know, I can go to HR and they won't just say, oh, it's just not, that's what men do. You know, it's kind of the first time where women have been able to claim agency and autonomy. over these issues that we've felt for years. You know, things like the Me Too movement and stuff. I think the political landscape for women has felt like quite positive. I think, you know, they would obviously vote in your interest to

to a more left-wing progressive society because that's what it offers. And just to tie those two things together, if the left of British politics, as you were saying earlier, is fracturing as it is, and if the kind of, not the extremes of it, because I don't think it's useful to describe Zach Polanski and the Greens as extremes, but the kind of the further left bits of it, the Polanski Green element of it is growing in the polls while Labour has been falling in the polls. What do you think...

the left in this country needs to do between now and the next general election, which might be three or four years away, if it wants to stop what you describe as the coming fascism? I think we need to unify on... you know, a topic. If they want stop the boats, then we need to tax wealth, not work. You know, I think we need to establish...

what the real problem is here. And they've already said, you know, the real problem is immigrants and that's what we're offering. We'll get rid of that. I want us to be able to offer... an actual solution that will help people, you know, policy change, things like that. I think, you know, sort of...

And that's always a problem with the left, isn't it? We love to critique. Like, critical theory is all about critique. So we love fighting amongst each other. Everybody is always like, oh, I can't decide what's the most righteous path to take. So nobody takes a set.

a step and i think we really need to just say look let's start imagining something that isn't this horror horrendous you know capitalism on steroids let's just imagine something different but do you think it would actually get voted in we've got People quiet quitting. We're over the bit where it's, you know, anti-aspirational. They've made us anti-aspirational. People don't believe in meritocracy. You know, Gen Z don't believe that...

you'll ever be able to afford a house, generally, you know? I don't think, like, young people are under any illusion that if they work hard, they will do well. I know you spoke to Eliza. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, that really is it. You know, if you don't have some sort of, like, social mobility that happened in the 80s with your parents, well...

Where are you going? So what gives you hope? Because that Dr Eliza Philby, she's a brilliant historian, wrote a book called Inheritocracy. We did a podcast which has really, really flown off the shelves. A lot of people have listened to it and seen the clips on social media. And since then, we've had figures, official figures, which show record levels of emigration from this country.

It's quite hard to be certain of this because the numbers on people leaving are necessarily, the detail and the data is a bit obscure. But it looks like record numbers of young people are leaving, which is a sense that I've got just from chatting to people for a long time. You're 26. You're credentialed. You've got, you know, this academic career. You're a superstar on social media. Not that that necessarily pays very well. You are bridging...

You know, the M6, I love this image of you driving up and down the M6 twice a week because, you know, that is such a powerful metaphor for social mobility, which, you know, maybe next time we come on this podcast we'll talk about. But what role do you want to play in this future? And what would be your message to...

fellow gen z's about why they should stick around you know i started it because i didn't have much help like i felt you started your social media posts yeah um And as an academic, as you know, you really, really struggle financially. And you don't ever feel like it's going to end. It's so, so tough. And people who...

I get so many messages of people who are like, should I do a PhD? You know, I really like what you're doing and I want to feel empowered and stuff. And I'm a nurse, but I really want to, can I sort of like financially? like and absorb it and i'm like i don't know because it's honestly so so hard like even on your mental health i've had like three jobs and done this phd and taught like it's

And starting that social media completely changed the way that I was thinking about what I was doing. Like, I got so... I never once thought that anybody would watch it or that... Never mind, I would be sat here talking to you six months later like what? It's honestly unbelievable.

to me but that gives me hope because i think there is so many people out there that just want to know that just want to feel like they can do something and you know i i always say to people who say to me what can i do what can i do it's just talk to me your mates at the pub talk to your family ask them what is it you know if you feel like they're not you know that they're going down this route of i don't know like the far right or or you just don't really feel like

uh what they believe in is necessarily the truth and you want to challenge it do that just challenge it but be compassionate you know be really really compassionate because division is not going to help anybody you know we have to really really hold compassion and talk to talk across you know talk across don't talk down to people if i may say um

to end on a note of hope not only I feel like I've learned so much from you not only in this conversation and through your social media but also you it's a weird personal thing to say but I've kind of through social media kind of

looking at people like you who've made ideas accessible and popular to millions of people has sort of restored my faith in social media and the fact that it can be used. for good. It's obviously used by people doing all sorts of terrible things. So I feel like you've restored my hope and I know you've restored a lot of other people's hopes because as I mentioned, when...

I put out a call for questions. We were absolutely inundated. And you said very kindly that you're going to stick around to answer those questions, which is going to be in our Monday episode, Your Radical Questions. But when you started out this podcast, you said you're a bit nervous. How are you feeling now it's done? I feel good.

It'll be really good. I feel like I got a lot off my chest. Well, you're welcome to come and see your podcast therapist anytime. Louisa Munch, it's such a privilege. Thank you so much for coming in and being our guest on Radical. Oh, thank you. It's been so good.

I shouldn't really say this because I'm not meant to reveal what happens in the green room. But Louisa Munch was a little bit nervous before we embarked on that conversation. And she had absolutely no reason to be. But it did give me a tremendous sense of satisfaction that at the end there, she said.

that she felt good and excited and happy once she'd finished. I thought she was going to say she felt relieved, but I think she really enjoyed it. And I know I certainly did. There is so much in what she said that stood out for me. One thing, which is where we started out in the first section, was her kind of somewhat...

interestingly radical and unfashionable and counterintuitive defense of university you know maybe it's says something about the temper of our times but her defense of university was not university as a way of equipping yourself with the economic skills and kind of paper credentials with which you can go about getting a certain job. It wasn't a form of credentialism. It wasn't a form of, you know, job readiness. It was her defence of university was...

It was this old-fashioned idea, if I may say, and I think a rather charming idea, that university is there for everyone. which in her view should be free for everyone as it is in Scotland today, but really to give yourself the kind of intellectual toolkit with which you can go about your business in the world, with which you can have agency, with which you can question.

everything with which you can dare to be wise, as the old phrase to Perry our day goes. And I thought that was a really interesting thing because you often hear people defend universities today in terms of economic utility, the so-called... graduate premium whether it's declining or not and you hear the same said about apprenticeships and about technical qualifications that they're a better way of getting yourself ready for the world of work but maybe education is not about

getting yourself ready for the world of work. Maybe it's about getting yourself ready for the world of thought. by which I mean ready for the world itself. I thought that was really interesting. The thing about nostalgia and that point that Louisa made where the left often construes nostalgia in terms of a longing, a sense of loss for that world of struggle, whereas the right has... a kind of sense of loss and a longing for a world of harmony. I thought it was so interesting how

In a weird sort of way, you often find this in politics where people on the extreme left or extreme right, people on the hard left, people on the hard right, share certain traits which they don't want to talk about because they want to pit themselves as opponents. But actually, the longing for struggle...

on the left and the longing for harmony on the right both appeal to a desire for membership a sense of being part of something greater than yourself being part of a collective whether it's the home as the politics of reform and national conservatism

James Orr might put it on the right, or the politics of the class struggle, as Billy Bragg, one of our other previous guests on this podcast, would have it. I think that is a weird sort of unity there. But all of this was suffused, because after she said it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. All of this was suffused with a sense of, my goodness, here is someone of tremendous intellect, growing and big influence, huge passion and moral fervor, but who's also a hundred grand in debt.

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