Taking Back Control: Why ‘Agency’ Could Be The Next Big Idea In Politics (James Kanagasooriam)

BBC-podcast on suurin edes koko koko. Sala ja kyydistä! Mä hänä toimi if vaikotus. Oksin edes koko koko koko. Sala ja kyydistä! Sala ja kyydistä! Sala ja kyydistä! Sala ja kyydistä! more agency and control over the lives, were in fact the traditional parties, the labour and the Conservatives. That's so interesting. So again, our politics is shifted, again not just away from left-right or, you know, is it about levels of educational immigration? There's another axis now that's cropped up, which is like, does the status quo work or does it not? Do you have control over your life or do you not? And that for me was really fascinating. And I think agency is something that's been discussed a lot in the technology community for the past four or five years. That's where Kate has worked in and around. I think there's no. Agentic AI, which is a slightly different meaning of it. It's slightly slightly different meaning. But again, I think that the transfer of ideas actually across those two different domains is actually much richer than we might think. You know, what does it mean to be in control? So again, I'm very interested in how is it lost? How do we get it back? How do institutions, the feedback I got from that post, people, a lot of people asked, "Okay, you've looked at it from the individual level. What does it mean for governments to have agency?" You know, a lot of the feedback that we've heard, both from this government and the previous Conservative government, is you can't just do things, which by the way is the tagline that a lot of people use for kind of pro-agency. It's a, the old night, the old night. The night, of course. Just do it. But on top of that, I'm imagining you and your, so you have these intuitions and then you go and do this data checkout, whether or not your intuitions are correct. And I'm imagining you and your, your colleagues Patrick Flynn with this political whiteboard, and then you write the word in big letters in the middle agency. And it's almost like agencies like the sun in this kind of solar system of social and political afflictions or issues. So if you, if you put it lack of agency, people that feel a lack of agency will be culturally pessimistic, we might, maybe more inclined towards zero sum thinking will be more anti, or less like to vote for Labour than Conservative, maybe more attracted to the Greens on one side or reform and all. I should be clear, we found that for me what was interesting is the political tilts were slight. It wasn't massive. There were pro-agency people everywhere, every part of the country, every political party. But what makes you think that this is, why is, why is agency such a use, I know there's no such thing as the magic wand of panacea, but why is agency so useful for understanding where we are today? I think it's useful because how many things it's clustered to, like if you think about the UK and many European countries basically going through a crisis of confidence, saying we should be happier is, is total logical. You can't just tell someone, be happier. Right, I don't think that's the solution. Conversation, I think that's a very successful conversation. Like, being, like, being, like, asking for unicorns and just be happy, you know, being happy is an output, right? And being trusting of others and your society and institutions and other people in the community and being optimistic as well. For me, it was the relationship to optimism levels that really took me, whereas I think agency could be more of a lever. But again, as a pollster, it's always your job to basically provide the evidence and then let other people take it because the other people who can prove causality, other people who can come with policies, other people who can test and experiment, other people who can take the thinking on further. And that's what it was there for. It was basically there, again, inspired by other people, to be honest. So, you know, I, I, it's very closely correlated, I think, to an idea that I've become slightly obsessed with, which is about cultural loss. And this is something that it's often, it often crops up in debates actually now in terms of, for instance, David Goodhart has written a lot about whether or not majorities have rights. In fact, he wrote along, because I've said recently, he said, "The way he concluded that majorities may want to have rights, but they're more likely to have interests." And this kind of idea that other people in maybe a similar political space like Eric Kaufman have written about whether or not white majorities in countries that have experienced very large scale migration feel and it's reasonable for them to feel and they legitimately feel and therefore vote accordingly a sense of cultural loss. And it's so interesting. I, I really, really think and I mean this objectively and impartially, that JD Vance's book, Hill Billy Elegy is one of the best books I've ever read about politics. I mean, it's, it's, first of all, it was written 13 or 14 years ago before, it's association with Trump and it's an incredibly beautifully and poignantly written memoir. I mean, it's so poignant that Netflix turned it into a, into a series and- - Quite a bad series. - I didn't see the TV series. I've got a thing when it's a TV series about politics, I always read the book first. It's called, and it's called Hill Billy Elegy. He's a Hill Billy JD Vance, he grew up in this extraordinary dysfunction, broken family dysfunctional drugs, opioid crisis, all the stuff he's raised by a very, very strong grandmother and grandfather. It's kind of gun slinging, gun-toting culture and on a code and so on. But the subhead line is I think a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. And I now realize just talking to you that what JD Vance's life is about, that to me is by the way, the book, which is the signature book for understanding how a sense of cultural loss and economic loss as owned partly to globalization really defines the life of millions of Americans. JD Vance is a family certainly. What he writes about in that book is a lack of agency. And he writes about how through education, through joining the Marines, through getting into law school, through politics, he acquires growing agency. And the story of his life is actually an aspiration for agency. And I wonder if one of the consequences of low agency being a kind of dominant feeling amongst a lot to not to people who feel this sense of loss is that they're more likely to vote for high agency politicians. But why wouldn't they? Right, you're voting for a solution. Particularly someone high agency politician who has made the journey, right? Isn't that the appeal of Trump? I mean, skeptics of Trump would say he's a demagogue and so on and so forth. Isn't there a sense with him that you may disagree with him, but he says he's going to do something and then he does it. Maybe sometimes he doesn't do it. Yeah. But you know, there's a sense that, you know, people feel way he said he's going to build a wall and maybe didn't build a wall. He said he's going to bomb that place and he did it. There's a sense that he's a high agency person. It's almost like he has the strength to accept that in Leslie, the writer. Yeah, yeah. No, they're subject. He's got a brilliant sub-sector called the Ruffian. Yes. Who said he was the highest agency politician he could imagine. Right. Which is the the Trump way as you can just do things. You say things and then you will do them and he doesn't always do them, but a lot of stuff does happen. It's almost like he transferred onto Trump or your leader, the agency that you lack. You know, you don't have control over your life. So you want someone else to kind of almost in a kind of big brother wave, perhaps, perhaps do it. But there is a connection, isn't there, between lack of agency or lack of control and this sense of cultural loss, which is what Vance's book is about and what a lot of other people are writing about the moment. And that sense of loss. So we do a lot of polling around the kind of degradation of civic infrastructure and cultural loss. And it isn't just kind of my community has changed too much. That happens. That feeling is very present in polling, but it's often about the really little things like the community fair that disappears or the hobby group that existed in the community and just disappears or the pubs and the clubs that have suffered from huge amounts of closures. There is just a sense that all the little things that make up people's lives or it might be as simple as your favorite TV show that was online that you formed a kind of community with in terms of your watch day. And that's not like disability. Everyone I know is talking about this. And I'd be interested in what you can and can't say. You're probably sort of doing so this research, but tell us what you can say. I've become slightly obsessed with this idea that social capital and the disappearance of civilisation or association or life, whatever, some people call it the big society, whatever. I basically, last summer I reread a book called "Bolding Alone" by Robert Putnam. That's, he's the godfather of this. He is the godfather and "Bolding Alone", which I mentioned in that episode with Jonathan Hyatt actually and Hyatt being a great sociologist, New the Work intimately. In 1995, Robert Putnam wrote an essay five years later he turned into a best-selling book. We talked about the decline of voluntary associations, so rotary clubs, women societies, sports groups, church groups, whenever it might be the big society. I don't really care what you could. It doesn't have, it's not left to right, I think, social life, social capital. And what Jonathan pointed out to me, which obviously is in the Putnam book, is that Putnam talked about how the rise of television had sort of created an appealing interior life where people used to play about on the street and then because of television in 20th century America, people, kids went from the street to playing watching as a family at home. You know, 30 million people watching whatever, some big show in America. And it's almost like the transition from, and "Bolding Alone" came out in 2000. The iPhone came out in 2004. And I sort of feel we've gone from bowling alone to scrolling alone, where in the transition from television to iPhones, even that family moment is reduced to an individualized atomized existence. At the same time is for lots of reasons social life has collapsed. Trade unions have collapsed, working men's clubs have disappeared. Ladies, societies, friendly institutes. The church. The church massively decline. Pubs, pubs are in crisis in this country. Well, these are all connected, right? What's going on? So interestingly, Robert Putnam is the godfather of all of this. Some of his work has since been updated, meta and the Royal Society. Basically, did a massive study of millions of people. friendship groups to cover a couple of things, a) one of your interests around social mobility, which I know that you're interested in, and second around friendship and connectivity. And they've basically found that the updated model is basically there are two types of social capital. The first is what they call bonding capital. Again, a very wonky term, but it's the idea of the closeness of relationships to people within an area. So how intense and how overlapping are the relationships that you have with the people that you basically live next to, or adjacent to you? And then there's bridging capital, which is the degree of capital that exists between a) communities or people or groups that are not right next to you, but might be adjacent to you or across from you. - Post go to post go, David, to near. - Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that a lot of these clubs and social life, and again, we don't talk about it, I guess because the idea that the answer to a lot of our civic issues is a hobby, doesn't sound very clever, right? - Well, people, there's not much social incentive to start talking about ultimate frisbee, as some kind of panacea for political problems. You wanna have big grand solutions that involve stuff, but actually what you're talking about is the stuff of life. - This is the hidden worth of nations to quote the title of David Halperns, but the trouble is, it's a hard political cell because people, probably me, back in the day would say, you know, the big society is a, there's a narrative, which is a cover for austerity, taking away the money from youth clubs, and you're saying we've got the big society, what you need is money for youth clubs, but some of this stuff doesn't need to cost that much money, does it? You certainly need people who wanna go. And is it the case that the decline of social capital, oh, I once understand why you think social capital or association or civic life is in decline? But is it the case that the decline in social capital has most affected people from poorer communities, and that, in a sense, people from poorer communities who are actually like economic capital, obviously, they want more economic capital, but they benefit most from access to social capital. - I think it's affected people everywhere, but the main thing that the meta proposal really struck out from me was the idea that in social capital rich settings, i.e. hobbies or groups, you actually had a huge degree of mixing. And I've also seen a lot of research that churches, for example, in the UK, and I'm sure other religious kind of institutions match that, are one of the biggest arenas for social mixing. And effective people who have different views, different values, different ways of thinking about the world come together. And I guess if you retreat out of the physical world, where you have all this mixing, you have a degree of conversation, you people are able to listen to each other and understand each other, and you basically retreat into a abstract thing that is governed by social media bubbles, but also kind of quite separate identities, then these things become a lot harder. You know, for me, the most depressing polling, and it's regularly done every year by different companies, is the percentage of people that wouldn't be friends with, or wouldn't necessarily be a partner with someone of a different politics. - Politics. - Political persuasion. There's a couple of things, right? The strange about that. First of all, how you vote is what you do in five minutes once every five years? Just think about it. That's quite a strange thing on which to demarcate and to view society based on what they do. Once every five years, in the UK, it's even stranger, because now we've got 50% of people changing their vote, every election. So it's strange for a number of reasons, and it seems to me that a lot of these things have coalesced to remove people out of the messy reality of convening and talking and being with people in their real physical life. - Some of whom will have different opinions. - Right. - On their favorite type of pizza, but also were, you know, reformed council tax. - Yes. - Must that ability just to live and not necessarily agree, but just live alongside. And so the degree of geographic self-sorting and then digital self-sorting has created a really difficult politics, and Pattenham was the person that called it, the other person, I think, who's very influential on understanding the role of technology and how it might change our politics, and I guess the attention economy is Neil Postman. - Amusing ourselves to death. - Where it's the kind of-- - Examinal. - For me, it's the companion piece to Robert Pattenham. - And about how this retreat out of the physical life into online, because ultimately the degrade, not everything, by the way, has degraded. If you go to the C Park Run, you see the number of people. - That's what I was gonna say. And I need to those types of groups. - I wanna do the antidote to decline, honestly, 'cause I feel this such a cultural script around, and I'm so conscious of it, 'cause I work in the news industry for goodness sake. There's such an obvious cultural script. It's a bit like recently people have pointed out that actually crime in London across most measures, and these are just facts. Crime in London is lower now than it has been for a very long time, homicide murder, and so on, things like that. But just on, and Park Run's a great example, but just these different things that are in decline. So in 2000, Pattenham talked about voluntary associations of groups, like sports clubs, rotary society, mothers meetings, trade unions, church attendance. Take all of those, put them in the UK. Add on the decline of the friendly societies or working men's clubs or trade unions, which 70 years ago, millions of people belonged to trade unions in a way they don't anymore. Add on the decline of pubs, which in Roger Scruton's immortal phrase added to the moral savings of their communities. Are these things linked, or are they just like? - No, they are all linked. It's about our use of time. And we have swapped out all of these different things to spend effectively what 15 years with our phones. Should you think about that as a transformation of our political, social, cultural life? That's a huge thing to have happened. Like we are now all live with a friend that is the size of your hand that you now spend 15 years with, the entire population, basically. - 15 years are over the course of your life. - Over the course of your life. And we've swapped that out for the messiness and the diversity, I think, cognitive and emotional and physical diversity of all of these different things. I don't think it's down everywhere. We measured degrees of social capital by areas of the country. And it does correlate to income. And this is the problem. If the country, as a pollster, we measure what's the number one problem? The cost of living crisis. The cost of living crisis is a very one-kish and a dying term to describe a crisis of the future. And a crisis of optimism. - Is there a crisis of meaning? I think it is about money as well. It's people. - Because cost of living is absolutely. I think cost of living is called poverty, right? But the point about calling it cost of living. Cost of living, the problem cost of living is not having enough money. And cost of living becomes an acute problem. In, it's got that sense of like adjusted for real term. - That's right. - It's about inflation and whether or not pay keeps up with inflation and they increase and gap between the two of them. But cost of living, to me, has a kind of almost de-Kenzie and mid-Victorian additional sense, which is about, the cost of living crisis is an expression of dejection about your country and society's prospects. - I thought the winning candidate in Gordon and Denton as a Hannah Spencer for the Green Party. - Tamma. - Put it really well. What's the point of working? - Well, you're working harder and harder for less and less. - That's actually correct. - Which is a amazing, astute and very efficient way of describing, we're using all these different terms, right? Which a lot of the time people are not actually the language that they speak in. But fundamentally, people are finding it harder and harder just to get on in life. So I think the issue about social capital and the issue about giving of your time, 'cause we're talking about time here. That's the most important variable. If you can't really approach this conversation about volunteering and enriching the social life of an area and recalibrating our time until people know how they're gonna afford their bills and their energy bills and how they're gonna get a pay rise and how they're gonna move. So the two aspects, this is where economics and culture not, yes, they can operate separately, but actually they're intimately connected. - With the idea of agency as this very useful, I should just say by the way, people should go and have a look at the political whiteboard. So named because there's a political whiteboard in your office and read this very long, brilliantly clear and cogent and wonkish blog post for themselves. And I don't wanna overstate it. I don't think James Cunningham Suri was going around saying agencies, the one big idea that explains all our politics, but it explains a lot of our politics. And that's at the kind of, you've talked about agency at the sort of individual level that if you kind of look at the polling, a bit like David Goodhart would say that if you looked at the British social attitude survey, it wasn't in there, it wasn't that people said, I feel like in any way, I feel like a somewhere, you kind of infer that from the sentiment that's kind of expressed there. Similarly, you're inferring that a lack of control or agency over our lives is a big thing for many, many individuals. Isn't it also, isn't agency a useful idea for understanding some of the problems of the modern British state, which is that if you look over the last 15 or 20 years, it is just the case that it's quite hard to get stuff done. And people talk about this a lot in the context of planning, but also just in terms of the politicians and these kind of weird advisors who come and go, like Dominic Cummings and Steve Hilton, they say, in white, well, just can't get anything done. And so lack of agency, as well as being a feeling for individuals, is to some extent a reality of the modern British state, isn't it? And I think if you read that again, outside my polling domain, but if you just read the feedback from the party government advisors, they always say, say, Paul Wyvernden, Ben Judah, they've literally all said exactly the same thing. Paul Wyverns, did you say explain work? I think for some reason, - Yes, it's a very interesting, a very interesting, labor intellectual who worked for David Lamy's, pieces in the Times recently, basically all work at the same block, all work at the same art. - Saying that we can't seem to get things done. - The state doesn't work, you need a fundamental rewiring of the civil service in white hall, you pull leaves and stuff, doesn't get done. So you've got a lack of agencies, the individual level, which is why the idea of taking back control and maybe politicians like Trump who appear to have agency kind of appeal, you've got a lack of agency when it comes to the state where, maybe because of the civil service, it's hard to get things done. And the consequence of those two, together with kind of sustained, low economic growth, has been a profound cultural pessimism. And do you see that now in the data? - You do. - Well, there's a couple of things on cultural pessimism. There's, if you ask people, what do you think about the political system, you get very negative feedback, between two thirds to three quarters of people, anti-politics, that we need some kind of renewal, reform, change, whatever your word is that begins with re, a restore, for some cases, right? It's very different, but they all have the same kind of roots. - Redical, ready. - Exactly. And for me though, there's a quirk, though, to the polling data. So you gov do a weekly tracker of life satisfaction. And I was looking at the data since 2019, it stayed flat. So you're asked basically, how satisfied are you with your life? Zero to 10. And the average score has been 5.7 literally for seven years. And so it's a bit more complicated than everyone is unhappy. It is a bit more complicated. And actually, I think there's a degree to which, how people view the system, how people view what's going on around them, is not necessarily completely coupled to their own life satisfaction. - Do you think that the, but all mindful, though it must be, that it is more complicated? Do you think that to the extent that there is evidence in the polling for kind of cultural pessimism, a kind of declineism? Do you think that that's beginning to have really kind of negative consequences? I mean, I mean, immigration figures would suggest a lot of young people including everything one, I know there are 20s thinking about leaving. But do you think that sort of where, it's real, the cultural pessimism is real? - And it's that, but it's making it harder to do politics. You know, it's making it harder to kind of cohere society. It's making it harder to, and yeah, by the way, it might be justified. You know, as I say, might well be justified, especially for young people who can't buy a house or have never experienced growth in their life. But is that, do you fear that, as you look at this kind of culture and of problems and challenges that Britain faces, that this cultural pessimism is gonna inhibit our ability to fix them? - I think when any societal community has a degree of unity and optimism, there's basically a greater degree of elasticity where it's able to deal with shocks and things going wrong and sacrifice, right? Which is what people have been through. But when you don't have those pillars, people ask, "What am I sacrificing for?" in terms of matter. In fact, they might be paying or what they're doing or what they're contributing to or certain diminishings of their freedoms as we saw during COVID. And it is really important for societies to cohere and for people to be satisfied and for people to be optimistic. And it's the silver bullet that everyone's been looking for. And I think, did I mean for the agency to be kind of a uni explanation for everything? No, because I think it's gonna be really unhard you've talked about the rise of all these different things that have occurred lack of income growth, the lack of unity, the decline of social capital, the rise of migration to levels which people didn't necessarily consent to, the rise of expansion of higher education beyond which the number of jobs exist to take into account. These are all like a maelstrom of different explanations and things that are damaging are cultural optimism. But again, I think what people are looking for is leadership out of it. I don't think people enjoy leadership business. Leadership and optimistic leadership are sense that someone can get things done in the United Country. (upbeat music) I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with James. Kanagasuriam, he is a hugely influential figure in modern British politics. So just bear in mind what you're hearing him say to you via me is the stuff that he's saying to people right at the top of British politics on both sides of the comments. So I hope you're getting some value out of it. If you are, please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds, that way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode. And you'll never miss out. Not bad is it? What a deal. Right, thank you and back to James Kanagasuriam. (upbeat music) You're doing a bit of work, I think, on the attention economy and kind of the implications of it. How has the attention economy, by which we mean the kind of extraordinary monetization of our attention by mostly a few companies and our willing conscription in this, by being on Instagram all day long looking at images of kettlebells, which I intend to contribute to quite a seriously, quite a soon. How is the attention economy fracturing some other societies do you think? So I'll reference the guys at Moan Common again. One of the key segments they found in the population when analyzing it, they called them skeptical scrollers. So it's the first time the British public have been analyzed and one of the key seven segments is literally defined by their attention and use of a phone. Who are these people? Effectively people who are very online, quite skeptical about institutions and different people. Oh no, they're not skeptical about scrolling. They're not people who've gained that so much media. No, they're not. I find that extraordinary because that's literally changing how we consume. It makes it harder to cut through. I guess particularly if you are used to them all kind of traditional outlets and ways of communicating. But crucially, it means you have to do quite strange things or more esoteric things or more meta things to grab people's attention. So we were analyzing the idea how many people multitask while watching something. I think two thirds of under 45s are literally doing something else as they watch something. So you might think you have eyeballs, someone's eyeballs, but you don't. That only versus only 27% of over 75s. We asked a focal data. We asked whether they agreed with the statement. I can't stop checking my phone when I should be focusing on other things, which is a completely terrifying phrase. 71% of 18 to 24-year-olds agree with the statement. I can't stop checking my phone when I should be focusing on other things. You had Jonathan Hite on. He can explain this in some depth. 66% of 18 to 24-year-olds say they struggle to concentrate on tasks that require long attention. James Marrier is the other thinker who's massive on the sheet. Great times, Colin. Writing a whole book about this crisis of attention. It changes everything because suddenly we're having to compete with short form arguments. And actually, a lot of politics is about the long form argument. It might not be necessary to win an election. You can win elections and slogans, but actually a lot of the fixes that are required are very long form arguments that have to display trade-offs. There's a complexity here, though, isn't it? Because on the one hand, I oweing to my interest in digital media. I've spent a huge amount of time watching online tutorials by Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast is the worst because YouTuber, I don't know if he's a billionaire, but he's extraordinary rich. Some of his videos, literally hundreds of millions of people are watching it like two-be-set-ups. No, I've lost in the Beast games. Absolutely. He's a huge, he's a kind of massive conglomerate in himself. And he's basically this guy called Jimmy, who from a very young age, have cessfully created videos. And he gives these tutorials, he talks about what you can do to get people's attention, hate, you can make the first three seconds, ever more, this idea of the hook. And now on your Instagram feed or your social media feed, it's just full of people saying, here's how you use AI to write three kilo hooks. It's all about grabbing people in that first three seconds. You think that's a good thing? No. And I think I kind of want to resist it. And I experiment with it a little bit. So people do all these weird things like crash zooms and out of focus and all this crazy stuff. And I just, I find it sort of unnatural and strange. I'm experimenting all the time, so I try and have a go with it. But I find it kind of difficult to reconcile that with the flip side of it, which is that one of the huge reasons for the success of podcasts and YouTube, if not the main reason, is long form. That's amazing. People want that sustained-- But what people are doing versus where they want to be are two different things. And I think there probably is a desire to not get rid of long form culture. It's happening everywhere. How many of the songs from the '90s, '80s, and '70s would have ever passed through the concept of a hook? Sure, loads of loads of tracks with amazing hooks. I don't know. How many Kate Bush songs would have made it through? If you think about the decline of the album, I think about the decline of classical music. Because the other thing is an art form that's under serious pressure. How much is your classical singer there? How much of that, though, would exist in a world of an attention economy? Who's going to listen to-- well, they know, two hours of Marla, who's going to listen to 30 minutes of something? Who's going to listen to 10 minutes of something? I think that, by the way, he talks about the sense of loss. I think people know that. They think that long form culture, whether it's a book, whether it's a piece of paper. music, whether it's a film, basically under attack, and not necessarily from other people, but from our own behaviours. And does that, that makes politics more difficult, because at the heart of why things haven't gone well as which we haven't discussed is the lack of trade-offs that there are real trade-offs that exist, like you can't just have X without Y changing. But that's already a conditional argument. Whereas if you just say it's all possible, which is a much neater, much more efficient way of communicating. There's no populist to. I think that's what everyone does. And I think it's very easy to warehouse a lot of the more negative things about politics and to pop. I think people have done it everywhere. If you think about the last election, you know, no tax rises or XYZ, right? That's from, and that happens across the centre right and the centre left across all of the other. But maybe that's because there are votes. I so interested in you say that. I think about that at the time. Do you know, I don't know if you've heard the pleasure of hearing me say this on the today programme. I have a sort of a rule. I don't do it 100% at the time, but I try in most politicians' interviews on the today programme to say the following words, all policies of trade-offs, who are the losers? I've done that maybe 50 times. I don't know where a few dozen times. Whatever. I've done it. I've done it. And I try and do it. Make sure I do it. Well, you never get a frank answer. You never know one, no one wants to talk about the trade-offs. And if you think about some of the intractable problems in this country, for instance, social care. And I mention social care because I think it's, you know, you could talk about it impartially, right? Because in 2010, the coalition government asked Andrew Dill not to come up with a report. You know what? You could find the Dill not report. It was published March 2011. He had some pretty interesting proposals about what's about social care. When Nick Timothy was advising Theresa May, they came up with a plan in the 2017 election. It was called a dementia tax. It's been put in about burner. What's happened right now? Louise Casey. Good on Louise Casey. I know her well. She's a tremendously bright public servant. She's doing a review into that and about 12 other things. I think her review about social care is going to report towards the end of this parliament. And then who knows who will be in government when its recommendations are implemented, if ever. You're talking about a country that takes 20 years to come up with a social care policy. That's cross party, right? Maybe that's because the voters. I know you've got to think that the voters are never wrong or not quite that, but you know, you can't want different voters. But maybe voters don't want to hear the trade-offs. Okay. So the person I think who I've learned the most from in terms of this particular question, which is how should research be used? Is it guy called John McTernan? Who I think was Blair advising. Blair and Brown advisor and also advised the Labour Party in Australia as well. Julia Gillard, I think from memory. And John taught his very expert guy. He's been around for a long time. And he talked about research being either a mirror or a lamp, which sounds like a kind of wolf haul offshoot. But it isn't. And he said, look, leaders, commercial leaders, corporate leaders, political leaders can either use polling as a mirror, in which case you ask, you know, what do you think about XYZ and then back comes the answer. And then you say, here is the answer. And, you know, he was a political strategist. So you know, he could have had an option saying, do this, do A, B, and C, because that's what the country wants. And there are people who use researchers as a lamp, which is all the kind of stuff that's in between, which is, yes, the poll says A, B, and C, but that's contextual. And they've said all these other things. And actually, if you want to get this done, this is how you do it. And this is how you move people. It's basically a difference between following people and persuading and leading them and showing them trade-offs. And he's said, the great people basically use researchers as a lamp to basically lead the way. He's got it right. The mirror in the lamp. I think you had a remantial to state, Mike. I think you should have a word or two. They might appreciate that. But I think it's really important because when you bid for someone's time in their answering a survey, you know, it's not on them that every single one of their answers is somehow some kind of future-proofed answer in which you can take decisions. They're just saying, this is how I feel at the moment in time. I call it the chocolate sushi problem, which is if you poll people, do you like chocolate? Yet they say yes. If you poll and do you like sushi, they say yes. And then politicians or leaders might say, right, we're going to launch chocolate sushi. And then it turns out that's not very popular. Chocolate sushi sounds repulsive. Exactly. But it's a way of framing how you shouldn't necessarily follow steers. You have to make things contextual. You have to make them real. That's by the way why people like Lutrile and other people like Deborah Mattson, for example, do focus groups because you put people in context. You talk with them. You understand what they say. You look at nonverbal cues. So from my perspective, when I say people aren't wrong and you're saying, "Oh, but people weren't by X." People are incredibly open to having the trade-offs put in front of them. The things that they want is that honesty and integrity and the ability, actually, of saying actually it can't all be fixed. These are trade-offs. These are the choices. And maybe politics is the art of persuasion and just the people that have been trying to persuade them aren't sufficiently persuasive. That might be the core of it. Let's talk finally about COVID. Do we do feel, and we've talked, you know, you're an optimistic kind of guy and so am I. Which is a bias. You should always be aware of. You're being optimistic. Well, I'm getting increasingly pessimistic about that. If that helps. It's gone well. If that helps. Well, James Kelly is coming to the top. And now, in the old, was it the projective national shared? And now, of wonkery with James Kelly, I'm sorry, I'm enough to turn the most optimistic Patriot in the word "declinist" anyway. COVID is an extraordinary kind of rupture in the normal way of things. Do you feel based on some of the research you're doing at the moment that we fully reckon with the impact it's had on us? So the British Social Attitudes Survey, which is conducted every year, collects information on what people think the size of the state should be. So should it be reduced? Should it grow? Or should it stay the same? This is where I take the view that people are amazing. Because they are incredibly intuitive about incredibly complicated and things basically. And basically, from 1980 to around 2021, the numbers of people who thought the state should either be expanded or reduced, moved in lockstep with the actual amount of state spending as a percentage of GDP. It's extraordinary. It's like a graph of, do you remember, I guess, if you did biology class at primary school, you have like homeostasis, like predators and prey. You literally interact with each other dynamically. So every time basically the state gets too big, people's public opinion changes and they say we want cuts. And every time the state is too small and people feel the public realm has been under invested in, they say, we would be okay with tax rises and we want the state to be invested in. And it's this perfect ecosystem where people understand what's happening and their responses change. And it's one of those things that I always look at and I think people are amazing and incredible in terms of understanding what's going on. Until COVID, obviously where the debt amount has spiraled out of control for the first time basically since the BSA have recorded things, that dynamic loop has been broken. And basically, even with the rise of state spending and the expansion of the state, the state pay people's wages, people saying there's no magic money tree and then it turns out that there is people have not got more skeptical over the size of the state, even though it has massively ballooned in size. And I think that's one thing that we're grappling with, which is that we now have like a fiscal reality that people haven't quite caught up to. And interestingly in the last year, we have seen from the BSA some of the sharpest rises in public opinion of people who think actually we should probably be spending a bit less. But that's been like a four year delay in terms of that. And that's the first time we track this and we look since the data since 1980. And for me, that's really, really striking. And that's a form of political long COVID basically, which is that it's kind of broken that link. The other thing I think is about what people think government can and can't do is just structurally changed because something that literally paid people directly. And I still think we're grappling with many consequences of that. People's disrupted lives, disrupted freedoms, how they can go about their lives, disruptions education, yeah, huge, huge cost. And again, yeah, not my field, but you can see this, that's scarring still hasn't, hasn't reduced. And I think it's only just now that we're registering changes in the British Social Actutes survey that's responding to the much bigger piles of debt that we have on the size of the state. How should we, as far as thought, because you're going to stick around, answer a few of our questions. How should we use the idea of agency to fight decline, to restore a sense of cultural optimism and to fix some of these problems? The most useful thing is, is understanding at a micro level. So where would you be lacking agency in a very micro personal environment and how could that be increased and then work your way up from that? Because ultimately people taking control of their lives, they're too careful with a message like that. It sounds paternalistic, it sounds like it sounds potentially lecturry. And that's why I don't suggest that people should do XYZ. I just say here is the polling and here is the data on agency. And oh, it looks to be, if you have lots of agency, that seems to be correlated with a huge amount of good outcomes. I think it's on, I'd go about to Kate Hall to kind of round it off, which is obviously she built this mental model of agency, basically out from her experience with AA. Alcoholics anonymous. Alcoholics anonymous, and it's maybe getting a bit meta, but she said towards the end of the interview that I had with her, that obviously, the thing that really transformed her is just knowing that there were people, and she thought because she was religious to higher power, she believed in the concept of grace, that actually she was able to take control, because she realized there were things she couldn't take control of, which I guess if we're being very meta, there's a thing when Margaret Fatcher gone to power in Downing Street in 1979, there's a line that she quoted about understanding the things that you have the power to change and those that you don't, which is I think a parrata, some Francis of the CC. Exactly. Almost matched perfectly what Kate was telling me about her concept of agency. And so that's not a policy answer. No, no, no, no. Believe in something in a higher power, but it's very interesting that's part of the playbook. But I think that's why people are looking for meaning, and they're looking for a sense of togetherness, and they're looking for something else. I don't know how to create agency at a community level versus government level. Those are two drastically different policy prescriptions. At the government level, that's to do with the law, that's to do with how it's enacted. That's to do with parliamentary sovereignty. Community level is kind of social program. But at the individual level, it's funny. There's an echo in what you say, as you may know, I spend quite a lot of time following health influences swinging kettlebells at the moment. And one of the things that I find is I'm actually, if I might as well admit, very inspired by people who turn their life around health wise. And after my dad died of type two diabetes, I thought you're overweight. You don't have to be overweight for 30 years in a scientific sense. You're South Asian, you like to get type two diabetes, have some agency, take control of your life and start swinging some kettlebells, turn your life around. And I know it's just changing the same, but now I think about it. I should look at those videos on social media and my own kettlebell routines and a whole different way. Maybe what I'm really doing is driving for agency, ability to take back control over my own weight. Doing a good job. Oh, thank you very much, and. Slowly disappearing, Amel Raj. Oh, not so fast. James, he's always such an enormous pleasure. Thank you so much for your magnificent analysis of British politics and everything else. I think agencies and ideas we're going to come back to. Thanks, all. (upbeat music) So for at least 20 years, I've heard people, I've read people right, columns, goodness me, I've commissioned some of these columns myself. I've heard podcasts, I've heard discussions of people saying, what's the big idea? I want to point out a time, the big idea was the big society. Another time, new labor was a bit of a big idea. I think there is a sense, and James is very. He's so smart about these things that he's sort of caveats it very intelligently, but there is a sense in which it is actually very, very useful to look at a number of the biggest issues, problems, crises, challenges facing Western democracies through this prism of agency. As he says, there is now a kind of graph, a kind of chart you could do, which shows that the higher your sense of agency, the more likely you might be, in most instances, to be happy with the status quo, whereas the lower your sense of agency, the more you feel like you don't have control over your life, the more you feel like you've experienced cultural loss, the more likely you might be to vote for radical change, whether that's, I don't know. The reform party on Nigel Farage or the Green Party under Zack Polansky. So I think there is a profound way in which agency is actually useful for understanding where we are. Now what'd you do about it? Well, we kind of got into that a little bit. I mean, people feel a greater sense of agency if they've got more money, economic capital, that's money in their pocket, that makes the cost of living less painful, but there's also a sense of which the lack of agency is distributed in a way that's really bad for poor people. It's perhaps not that surprising that the poor you are, the less agency you feel. And there is an interesting question. Actually one raised by the whole idea around the big society 15 years ago. And indeed JFK in a very different context, several decades before, this idea that the big society and social capital civic institutions, which have been in some decline, might actually begin to if restored, give people a sense of agency, even if they don't have a huge amount of money. It's not a substitute, but it might be something of a supplement. And that whole area that we talked about, the decline of civic institutions of association or life, of social capital, I just think it's so, so interesting. When James said, we've swapped out all that stuff, the stuff I grew up with, maybe he grew up with, maybe you grew up with, we swapped all that stuff out for 15 years on a phone. Makes you think, doesn't it? Which I guess is the idea behind this podcast. This week on Political Thinking, Nick speaks to the shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, a man who spent years at the top table of Rupert Murdoch's sky before jumping on the Boris Johnson train and entering politics as a conservative MP in 2019. They're discussing a huge number of things, including Andrew Griffith's fascinating life story, but particularly in this episode, you're gonna hear about what more in the Middle East could mean for global business. That is it for now, but please do make sure you check back here on Monday, because James K, as we sometimes call him, James Kanna Gassurim, is gonna be answering your radical questions in our bonus Q&A, and their terrific questions with really superbanzes, well worth your time. To make sure you don't miss future episodes, please just hit subscribe on BBC Sounds, and that way you will get an alert every time we release a new episode. We'll speak to you soon, thank you, and goodbye.