Why the hard right hate London

This is a Global Player Original Podcast. I didn't think it was possible to hate London any more than I do already because it's such an unbelievable huge hole of a place. I'm here today on Oxford Street where this This is the state of Sadiq Khan's London. We've got a private business warning its customers and other shoppers here to keep the phone. Why is life? contract in London is under strain like never. Now we know that knife crime has exploded. I think we're living in lawless London.

London's just fallen to the point now where if you have money you have to hide it. It's crazy. London's completely Among others you heard there were Lawrence Fox, Nigel Farage and Andrew Tate. trying to paint London as this dystopian hell hole where if you walk out of your front door, that is if you haven't already been burgled, you're going to be mugged, you're going to be raped, you're going to be assaulted, and you're going to have your phone stolen.

London has problems, but why is the right trying to turn London into a metaphor for everything that is wrong? Has it anything to do with the city having a Muslim mayor? Welcome to the news agents. The news agents.

It's John. And it's Louis in San Francisco. Lucky you. Guys, so you're no longer in Vegas. You've abandoned Vegas. Unfortunately the authorities made me leave John. Uh For reasons that are undisclosed, they made me leave. But you know, I've come to uh San Francisco instead, the heart of the digital universe, to do more on this AI story, but the hotel's Wi Fi is down and there's no power. So, you know, maybe actually maybe actually

Uh maybe the future's not all it's cracked up to be, do you know what I mean? The future is bright uh no it's not. Um look, we spoke about London on the podcast the other day and dare to suggest That London may be an okay place to live. Complicated with crime, with all sorts of problems. And the abuse that we got from the right, the far right, about daring to suggest That it wasn't hell on earth.

Has made us kind of think, why is London being demonised in this way? And actually, kind of in fairness to the people who've made these criticisms, do they have a point? Is London hell? Are we underplaying the scale of crime in the city? And we just wanted to today trying to have a bit of a realistic appraisal conversation. about the London that we live in. I I think I think this is such an interesting phenomenon. We we sort of touched on it earlier in the week.

Uh we were talking about it to be honest it was it was an in-passing comment for me in a sense because we were talking about Trump and we're talking about American politics and we were talking about why it is that Trump has chosen to deploy the National Guard to the street of Washington DC and I was just making the point that you know, this has been the political Fight against the cities.

on the American cultural political right has been a sort of mainstay of American politics since the nineteen seventies and the n late nineteen sixties since the since the days of of Richard Nixon, invoking the spectre of the city as a form of of lawlessness. of crime, often of of racial tension, and the right using the city as a synonym, often for for all of the things they don't like in politics. And to be honest, often as a kind of veiled attack on ethnic minorities and so on.

That hasn't been nearly as big a feature of British politics. It just hasn't been there. It's just it's just not a kind of parallel to American politics we've had until really recently. And you have seen on the online right, the digital right, the terminally online right, as I I prefer to call them.

the constant invocation of our cities and London in particular, although any city and we can come back to this and the importance of it, any city in particular with a with a big Muslim population, but London in particular, as a kind of Hell hole, hell on earth, dystopia the way that the rest of the country will go

if we're not careful and if we don't do the things that they want to do. And and as soon as we just mentioned that in passing, I think it's been viewed a million and a half times, that clip. And like just the the sheer venom that has come down on that and I don't care and you don't care, you know, we don't care about these things in in particular. I sort of take the view that if all of those sort of people are pissed off, you must be saying or doing something right.

But I think that it is nonetheless an interesting phenomenon because it is not only something that we see From these sort of termly online accounts, we see it By mainstream right political figures, whether it's Robert Jenric or Baidenock or or Farage, the invocation of London and going after Sadiq Khan in particular has become a sort of key sort of staple of their politics. I don't know about you, John, but I I don't remember anything like it in British politics before.

No, and I I've got to declare an interest here. I'm a Londoner. I was born in Hammersmith. I grew up in the east end of London, in Stepney, off the commercial road. The flat we lived in was burgled twice in the nineteen sixties, moved to North London. I was mugged outside Kentish Town tube station in nineteen seventy five. I mean look, crime has been a feature of London life.

Forever. Cities have problems. There is no utopia on earth. I thought it was kind of interesting in 2012 when we hosted the Olympics. and you had the Queen jumping out of a a helicopter to parachute into the Olympic Stadium and you had David Beckham going up the River Thames in a speedboat and it was this sort of glorified Richard Curtius style view of London. I thought that was overdone. But nothing like as overdone.

As the dystopian hell we are being presented with now as if London has suddenly in these past thirteen years since twenty twelve become this terrible, terrible city to live in. London is a vibrant city with great theatres, with great cinemas, with great cultural life, with diversity and restaurants. You know, it's wonderful. It's got problems as well, like any city anywhere in the world.

Yeah, look, let's just deal with with with the facts, right, first of all, before we can get onto the politics. Facts, Lewis? People don't want the facts, they want their prejudices. Well indeed so. Look, there is Crime in London. There are crimes in every city in the world. It is a megacity. It is a global megacity. It is without doubt one of the greatest, if not greatest city in the world. It would be very peculiar if there weren't crime. It has always been there. Some measures of crime.

Have got worse over the last couple of years. Yes, there is a big problem with phone theft. Yes, there is a a a problem with that sort of robbery that we haven't seen in the past. Other crimes, but when you compare them to ten, twenty years ago, have gone down, whether it's car theft or burglary or whatever it happens 準備

And these things do shift and they do fluctuate. And I think there are also questions and problems which we talked about on the show many times. And I think liberalism ought not to shy away from this. Yes, there are some problems around integration. Yeah, there are problems in particular, which we've seen.

play out in terms of sexual violence uh against women. These are problems which ought to be taken seriously. No one should shy away from them. We should look at them and think we should talk about them in a dispassionate way and think about how we're gonna improve them.

But the truth is these people are not interested in that. I think John half of the people that have been coming for us over the course of the last week and and who constantly invoke this particular politics Most of them probably have never been to London. Or they haven't been to London recently, they certainly don't live there. I have been it is quite interesting, astonishing.

In the last twenty four hours, partly in response to to that clip. Astonishing how many of these far right accounts seem to have been mugged in the last twenty four hours alone. Seems to have how remarkable that. Just remarkable that in the last twenty four hours they've been walking around the streets of London And have been subject to personal muggery or whatever it happens to be.

And the truth is is that most of it is complete bollocks. Most of it is just nonsense. Most of it is a lie. Most of it is made up. Why do they do it is the interesting thing. And I think they do it.

Because London, and not just London, but the big cities as well, it embodies the politics that they abhor. Their entire shtick, their bullshit, is predicated on the idea that. Multiculturalism, people from different backgrounds, contemporary liberalism, if you like, all of the things that have made up liberalism over the last 10, 20, 30 years. That if you have these things. That it will inevitably lead to a sort of civil war. It will lead to social breakdowns.

that you have these people living side by side, it cannot happen. And in particular they focus on Muslims. If you've got a lot of Muslims somewhere, it will just inevitably, inexorably, reflexively lead to a kind of civil breakdown. It doesn't. We you and I both know we live in London. It doesn't. London is a thriving city which has a huge economy, which contributes so much to the UK.

And the fact that it doesn't, it means that London lives rent-free inside their head, because it is a living embodiment of how completely wrong they are in their politics. every day of the week. So they have to slam it, they have to eviscerate it, they have to tell lies about it and all of our great cities as well. So I I kind of sometimes wonder whether

Delete London, insert immigration. Because that's what really you are talking about. It's like I want to make an amendment to this motion. London is a hellhole. Delete London, insert the word immigration instead. And it's being used as a sort of proxy for an anger about the way the country has become multicultural, multiracial, and y the London I remember growing up. Which was The food in London was considered the worst you'd get anywhere in the world.

I became the Paris correspondent. The food was way better in London than in Paris. There was much more variety. It was much more interesting. Because of course you have brought people in from around the world who've set up lives here. who've created this melting pot of a city, yeah, and with all the problems. I want to go back to Lewis, something you said a moment ago about the facts, because we've been sifting through the Office of National Statistics

data. And if we were presenting it as the Premier League table, London is sort of mid-table. There are areas where we're worse on some things. Muggings have gone up, for example, quite considerably, but sexual offences, London has recorded, a rise less than the national average. You know, thefts, yeah, up five percent. But knife crime down. Shoplifting, twenty percent rise.

You know, but drug offences way worse in other parts of the UK compared to London. Weapons possession. London saw a sixteen percent drop in possession of weapons compared to the national decrease of just one percent. Hertfordshire Dangerous Hertfordshire had a thirty five percent increase, closely followed by Dafford Powers in Wales with a thirty four percent increase. Now the mean streets of Welshpool, John. Exactly. Why is no one talking about Welshpool?

you have to ask that question and it you know, we can be glib and flippant about it, but realistically guys What is your problem? London is complicated. London has seen a rise in certain sorts of crimes and a fall in other sorts of crimes. But when you try to present the city as Lewis, the other day when we were talking about this, you referred

To Gotham City. You feel that sort of Robert Jenrick has taken on the role of Batman as the Cape Crusader who's going to stop the crime and stop all this decadence and decay. Look, In a all sorts of cities. The history is that there were gangs. You know, nineteen sixties London where I grew up, East London, you know, the Cray twins weren't that nice. They were kind of controlling large chunks of the east end of London. The Richardsons were in South London. They also weren't that nice.

Have there been problems in London for a very long time and other cities? Yes, of course there have. Is it measurably and immeasurably worse now? I'm just not convinced.

No, because and you're right not to be convinced, Sean, because in in so many ways it's not. London is a a great city. And I'll tell you this, if all these people don't like London, all right, and they think it's it's a hellhole, uh here's a little experiment we can do. Well we'll let London just keep all of the tax revenues that it generates. It won't send it anywhere else in the United Kingdom. London will just keep it.

Let's see how people like that. Because the truth is, is that not just London again, Our great cities, they are the dynamos of the economy. They are the thing that generate the majority of the tax receipts that actually subsidize. I don't really like that word, it's not really a subsidy in that sense, but they certainly there are significant transfers of wealth.

Of income to other parts of the country. London also gets a lot of investment, right? And so on. But let's see how we like it if those cities are taken away. The truth is, is that the reason The cultural right are coming for for London and and other cities like it is because they abhor its politics.

They do not like the fact that so many people of different races live together harmoniously. They don't like the fact there are so many gay people in the big cities. They don't like the fact that there is a a a cultural liberalism which is at the center

of the politics of these cities. And so they just have to make things up about it. They just have to make things up about it and invoke things which don't exist. That is not to say again that there aren't problems. But the problems actually that there are in cities like London, they don't want to talk about what's London's biggest problem? It's not the fact that it's about to break down into complete civil disorder. How's it?

It's the fact that people who are born in London or moved to London can't afford somewhere decent to live. It's the fact that over years and it is true to say that some of the the basic infrastructure of our big cities, the kind of the sort of lived experience of being in these cities has decayed in many areas because of a lack of public investment of years and years of these cities not being looked after properly. So yeah, there are problems with our cities, but it is not

The problems, or they are not the problems, that these people want to talk about, because these people have absolutely nothing of interest to say about any of these things. They would rather rail against ghosts. and phantoms, imagined cultural enemies, because that is what their politics is. They have nothing to say about the day-to-day lived experience of ordinary people who are living in these cities who do want answers for why parts of their cities or things in their cities

are declining, but it's declining not for the reasons that these people say. The other thing to say about that is, you know, yeah, of course. If you come and live in London, it's really expensive and you need to have a decent weight. Why? Because London is in demand. If there was no demand To live in London. If people didn't want to come to the city, if jobs weren't here in the city, if it wasn't the centre of all sorts of, you know, brilliant, vibrant industries

then people would stay away and they wouldn't want to come to London. And of course because so many people come here from around the world. We're not talking about people on small boats, we're talking on people on jets coming in from the States to work in the City of London or from anywhere in Europe because it's such a vibrant financial centre, one of the great financial centres of the world.

That is driving up prices and yeah, there are challenges there in terms of affordable housing and all the rest of it. But London is a place where people want to come from around the world, and we should be celebrating this capital, not just decrying it as a Neflex reaction. To the fact that there are some Muslims who live here, and the mayor happens to be Muslim as well. And I do think that there is something that is pretty racist.

at the heart of this. Oh Johnny, without doubt. I mean th th the the people who are generating or or pushing the direction of sort of the politics of the right online, the online right, they're completely racist.

They're completely xenophobic. Anybody who's been on X recently can see that. Look at the things that don't take my word for it. Take what Ben Abis Jekti, who's a conservative MP, the new conservative MP, has been saying or tweeting. Go and look at his account over the last 24 hours or so. The stuff that he's getting from these accounts. Conservative MP is beyond the pale. He's been charting and talking about how the Overton window, something we talk about.

A lot, the the parameters of what is acceptable in politics, of what is acceptable say, is not just shifting, it is galloping, and it is galloping in a direction which is undoubtedly, undoubtedly racist. You mentioned Khan, and I do think. that that is important. One of the reasons, not the only reason, but it is without doubt. One of the reasons London occupies this this place, as I say, rent-free in the heads of the of the sort of online cultural right.

is because Quran is a Muslim and he's a Muslim mare. That's got a long pedigree as well. You know, the the fight between or the sort of the ongoing feud and conflict between Trump and Kant. Undoubtedly. there is an element of it being being a Muslim. And you know, the sort of online discourse which is that Khan is leading to this lamification of London, all of this sort of all of this sort of stuff. It's prevalent, it's virulent, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere.

And for my part, what I think needs to happen far more is people, mainstream politicians, media, calling this stuff out. calling this stuff out because it's not just stuff that happens on X. It's easy to go, oh, these are just bot accounts. Honestly, these accounts have got millions and millions of followers. The things they are saying are being seen millions and millions and millions of times. And whether people agree with it when they see it or not initially.

There is no doubt that it shifts the perception of politics. It shifts that overton window that I've just talked about. It changes the tenor of politics in a substantial way. And there has got to be a counter reaction to this stuff. It can't just be dismissed as sort of the musings of of of

of just insignificant people. Th they they are insignificant people. They're certainly stupid people, but they're influential people. And I think that mainstream political forces, whatever you want to call it, progressive politics, left of politics, centrist politics, whatever you wanna call it, I've got to start taking it seriously because the city stuff, yeah, it's important, but it is just a cipher

for a wider shift which is going on in politics which is deeply, deeply sinister. You know, look, I don't I don't wanna seem like I'm sitting here as a sort of spokesperson for Sadiq Khan. I think Sadiq Khan has done some good things and I think he's done some lousy things.

in London. He's an elected politician where he's not going to keep everyone happy and I've kind of expressed that various times on this podcast the things that I think, oh God, what are you doing to London over this and that and some of the things that are happening. But why don't we talk about Andy Burnham in anything like the same way? Does anyone ever say bloody hell Andy Burnham?

I mean, Donald Trump doesn't talk about Andy Burnham. I don't think Nigel Farage talks much about Andy Burnham. I don't think any of the others, Lawrence Fox, talks about Andy Burnham. But the online right love to talk about Sadiq Khan. What is the difference between Sadiq Khan and E Burnham? Question mark.

Right, from one city to another. I'm here in San Francisco. We've been working on these AI stories all week. And when we come back, we're just gonna bring you a conversation that I had with someone. Well, it blew my mind. So I think it might blow yours as well. And it is about how AI Can and probably will reshape something as fundamental to the human condition as death itself. Stay with us. This is

Right, so as I say, we've been on the west coast of America all of this week working on a a couple of different stories. One of them is this wider piece, documentary piece we're gonna bring you in the next couple of weeks about AI and how it is on the cusp of transforming so many elements of our life. I know in some ways that sounds familiar, but for my money, I don't think we have properly, in a political way,

Engaged with that transformation, and we often think that this is something that's maybe coming in three years or five years or ten years. It's not, it's happening right now. So that's coming, but

We were at uh a conference, it's the world's biggest AI conference. That's why we were in Las Vegas. Obviously there was the blackjack as well, but the main reason we were in L Las Vegas was for this conference called AI Four. And there was this huge exhibition hall full of different companies and exhibitors.

trying to flog their wares, including not least bizarrely robotic dogs. It was like kind of deeply, deeply black mirror going from sort of one stall to the next and hearing about the different things they're doing. But one in particular really stayed with us and it was this company called Reflexor. And it was a company that is promising. To basically bring your dead relatives back to life.

It would input their data and you will be able to talk to your dead relatives as much as you want for a monthly subscription. This is the conversation I had.

with one of the senior people at that company about what they're offering and about how it might transform death itself. Yeah, my name is Greg Metuski. I'm one of the founders of Reflecta. And tell us about Reflecta, what is it? It's a very unique platform that lets anybody virtualize someone from their past that they love and cherish. It's a way for families to capture and document stories from the past.

and share them with future generations. What you do is you load in information about the individual, and then conversationally or through text, you can train the model, you give it a fingerprint of the voice, and then you can start interacting with it, talking back and forth. Like my father,

World War II veteran, he's virtualized, and I can talk to him about his experiences in World War II, the stories he's told me for years, that now my grandchildren, my children and grandchildren can hear from his mouth. Let me get this straight, Greg. So you can input sophisticated. Sufficient data into your program which will allow people to communicate in a sense with their relatives who have long since died. Yes. So you put enough information in it prompts you.

and then you can conversationally tell it more information over time in the biographer and it virtualizes that person in their voice. And you can do this through text or you can do this through voice. into the model and then you can have a conversation. You could ask it, Dad, what would you think of AI in twenty twenty five, which he passed away in twenty oh five. So it's a unique way to capture stories but also to stay connected and receive advice from those

Who have uh you find important in your life. Sounds like pure science fiction. It is pure science fiction. It's all here because of AI and its ability to tell stories and work with human beings to capture past events and histories and family legacies.

Is there not a bit of a profound danger with it though, Greg? I mean, in a sense that once people have died, I mean to die is a fundamental part of the human condition. To grieve and to lose is part of the human condition. And you could basically be in a position where you're persuading people that they're talking to their dead relatives, but they're

They're not. It's a fiction. It's a phantom. It doesn't really exist. It's a machine. I speak with my dead relatives all the time. I look to them for advice and this is a way. It's not them. It's not them, but it is their stories and legacies. It's their experiences.

Which has floated to the surface for me. But let's imagine I can there's a lot of evidence that AI is an effective uh way to overcome grief and to overcome loneliness. And this is being seen in everything from mental health to Alzheimer's. But that's a great example in a way.

I mean I could imagine, I mean I lost my granddad who was like a father to me some years ago. I could imagine a situation in which when he died, if I'd had access to the machine, I'm I might have talked to him all of the time and convincing myself that he wasn't really dead, when actually it would have been far better for me to just move on with my life.

Well there's breaks on the system, so if somebody's overusing it, it shuts down, so you can't become too dependent on it. However, what it allows you to do is remember those people in a way at your own pace. So you can go to the machine and ask it any question you want.

Now, it's not for everyone, right? It's to pay for it. Yeah, there's a subscription service behind it. You pay the subscription service and it remains online for as long as you want. Do you understand why some people might find that rather exploitative that a company like yours would make money from people's grief in that way and potentially

keep them in a sort of stasis in that grief. Well, you know, people use the internet to store their videos from their past life all the time. This isn't something new in that respect. You keep a lot of things online for future generations or for your family. So this is the same extension of that, which uh does it through voice or through text. I can imagine turning to like my dead relative asking for advice. He gives me bad advice. And then what?

And then I say, well I did it because my I took advice from my dead relative, but it wasn't really them, was it? People turn to Chat GPT all day long for advice. It's up for you as the human to determine if that's the right advice or not, right? So AI has already Are we being used for that?

This is just a- Are you thinking as a company, you think about the ethical implications of what you're doing? Is that something that's on your mind? That's all we've thought about, is how to put compassion and humanity into this experience for people. Many people want to remember their relatives. Many people want to remember the family.

They want to hand it down to their children and grandchildren just like they would on uh Ancestry or or Legacy dot com. All those things are are intended to help you understand what came before you and how it might impact your life right now. Lewis it's mind blowing isn't it? I mean that kind of question that I mean you raised, you know, what is it about I mean there's a the there's an AI question, but there's a philosophical question about death.

Which is part of what happens to us. We all eventually die. And it's this somehow We don't we don't grieve. We just carry on speaking to whoever you mentioned, your granddad, I could mention my mum and my dad, you know, who have gone. But you do have to move on, and this is something very exploitative it feels to me. about the idea that they're going to cr recreate in some virtual form.

your dead relative as if they can give you advice about what you need to do with your life in future. Yeah, I think this is just one of those ways, uh yet another way, in which we have not even begun, conceptually, philosophically, politically, morally,

begun to grapple with the changes which are coming as a result of AI. It's so obvious the ways in which this could become very problematic very quickly for all sorts of people who basically come to believe genuinely believe that their relatives are alive in a sense when they are clearly not and when they when they are dead.

and all of the different ways that that could lead to both personal problems but also sort of wider societal problems as well. It's not something that politicians have even begun to to sort of deal with or think about. There have been loads of stories in the last few weeks alone in the US of people, this isn't people who have died, but people who have ended up in a form of psychosis.

with AI because AI has convinced them of things which are not true. There was a story in the New York Times just a week or so ago of a man who he was talking to AI a or to Chat GPT about a maths problem. And ChatGPT convinced him that he had solved a sort of fundamental problem of physics and of mathematics, and that because of that, because he knew that. it would basically lead to the destruction of the world. And

He kept asking this ChatGPT, kept saying, This is not true, just come on, you're pulling my leg here, right? And ChatGPT kept basically telling him, no.

No, you're completely right. And he's saying, Well, I'm t asking, I'm phoning these government agencies and they're telling me me it's wrong and Chat GPT says to him, That's what they would say, isn't it? Inducing a form of psychosis and paranoia And the actual kind of ethics of this and the regulation of this and the way that these companies control this stuff. just isn't really there. These companies themselves can't really adequately control. the models that they have created.

So I'm someone who believes and having sort of been thinking about it quite deeply now for a while and and being at that company, you can absolutely see the transformative potential of this technology in all sorts of ways. It's already manifesting itself in that way, whether it's advances in in cancer or medicine or technology or green technology and all sorts of different things, antibiotics research. But the potential for us as human beings to change what it is to be.

a human as a result of our relationship with these models is I think also deeply profound. So it's not just a technological question, it's not just an economic question. As you say, John, it's a philosophical question with which we need to grapple. I I I loved the bit in your interview Lewis where you asked him how much he's thinking about the ethical considerations of this and he said, Oh we think about that the whole time. And then he proceeded to lay out the business model.

of how the subscription basis would work and that it would be still and I thought, you know, America is a fantastically entrepreneurial society and this is why you can see it is, you know, at the forefront of capitalism because people see the way to get an idea and to monetize it. And I'm struck by with AI how much more ready they are to monetize it than think about the ethical and philosophical considerations.

of what they're doing. Because I think there are some pretty profound questions that that interview raises. And that interview is just a microcosm. of the wider picture of AI.

And the way it's going to transform our lives. And I think the way the conversation has gone so far is, oh, it can tell you all sorts of answers to different technical questions. Yeah, we know I I can do that. But it's the other thing. It's the wider aspect and just what you were saying, the psychosis induced in this person when they started off with just grappling with a maths problem. We are at the foothills of our understanding, whereas the science is galloping way ahead.

Yeah, and I th I think the best I was talking to someone at that at that conference who I mean, they are all all these AI people, I think I don't think it's a sort of act, I think that they they have um a deep positivity and optimism with regards to the technology and you sort of ask them about the potential problems and they sort of they've got such a sort of deeply embedded optimism. They assume that the tech itself will be able to solve most of the problems.

that arise from it. Nonetheless, the sort of more thoughtful ones will grapple and will acknowledge that the scale of the change which is coming does pose Hugely profound political and philosophical questions, which in fairness, they are not necessarily the people to answer. That does rely on politicians. I was talking to one guy who was saying, look, the best comparison of this

is the industrial revolution itself. You know, think about the changes that the Industrial Revolution brought about. And the dynamic and the the parallel, I think, and the interesting one, is that those changes were poorly regulated by politicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, right? It shocked politicians at the time. And you can see that manifest in all sorts of different ways. What happens you end up with

profound problems around child labour, industrial law, insofar as it existed at all, which clearly was not fit for purpose. It took all of the conditions which arose to slam housing, the urbanization of society. It probably took a century. From the start of the nineteenth century to the end, for politicians and for what were then nascent democratic states.

to properly grapple with the questions, the political questions and legal questions and regulatory questions that the Industrial Revolution posed. And this is gonna happen even faster than the Industrial Revolution. I think the big question for me we're gonna explore it more in th in this show when we do it, the asymmetry of knowledge, of information, of even engagement between the industry itself, the technological and economic changes which it is unleashing,

and the knowledge of the politicians and the conception of the politicians about those changes I think is gaping. I think it is gaping. We end up basically talking about All of these sort of like petty questions of cultural politics, some of which we were talking about at the top of the show, these are the things which animate our politics day to day. This is the thing which is truly transforming the underbelly of our politics.

I don't think that our politicians have even really begun to engage with it. And that's the thing that worries me, because in that gap between that lack of engagement and the time and the changes that are coming, you could have Changes that were akin to what happened in the Industrial Revolution. All of those positive things but deeply negative things as well that politicians take decades to actually grapple with.

And before we go, if you're on to your sixth pint now, having got your A-level results and got into the college or higher education institution of your choice. Congratulations, Mr. If you've got an A for your politics and you think it's entirely down to the help that we have given on the news agents, obviously We take all the credit for it. It's not your teachers. It's entirely down to Emily, Lewis and me and the guidance we've given and the fabulous insights into politics.

Good luck to you all, whether you go to the institution of your choice or something altogether different. There are many paths to take in life. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.