In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundation for a future that we would be proud to leave behind. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are exploring the most practical of the thrutopian ways forward that I have come across in a while. Because we can have as much theory as we like, but if we don’t know the actual practical changes we could make in our political economy, things that we could do tomorrow that would not require extra legislation and could transform our society, then we’re sunk. And that means we need somebody who knows the law inside out, who understands politics inside out, who understands economics in great depth. And Jamie Driscoll is that person. Jamie grew up in the northeast of England with a dad who drove a tank in the army, and a mum who was a youth worker, trade unionist and set up the first women’s refuge from domestic violence in Middlesbrough. He left school at 16 and returned to education as a mature student, where he got a degree in engineering at Northumbria University. He went on to run his own business as a software developer until when his kids came along, he was married to a GP, he wound back his business and became the main carer for their children. He was 48 when he became a politician, he had been teaching jiu jitsu up until then. Whoa!

Manda: And he clearly brought the clear thought of an engineer, the absolute essential logistical capacity to think in systems, the empathy of a parent and the basic common sense of his upbringing, to all of the roles he has held. He was elected mayor of the Newcastle City region in May of 2019, a position he served in until 2024. Turning Newcastle into what the Guardian called the capital of a new radical British politics. And this is key to what happened next. In his five years in office, he had to work around four different prime ministers, six different chancellors, a global pandemic, Britain leaving the EU, energy price shocks, a cost of living crisis and the start of a ground war in Europe. He is one of a tiny handful of democratic socialists, as opposed to social democrats, and we will go into that in the podcast, who have experienced running an arm of government in the UK. He smashed the job creation targets by over 300%, built affordable homes to high eco standards, ran child poverty prevention programs, delivered skills training to thousands of people to enable them to increase their earnings.

Manda: For every £1 invested, his team returned over £3 to the UK Treasury in increased payroll taxes from job creation; and that doesn’t count all of the other multiplier effects that we also talk about in the podcast. He even had a successful venture capital program that generated profits for the team to spend on other programs, rather than them being funnelled off into tax havens by private investors. Sounds good right? So of course, in 2024, when he was due to be re-elected in what was a slightly different constituency, the boundaries had shifted somewhat, at his instigation, the Labour Party changed its own internal rules to block him from standing as a Labour candidate. He was too good, too effective, too socialist, too intelligent, too competitive and too competent for them to let him continue when their entire reason for existing was to crush the left in the party. He ran as an independent in that election and came second after the official Labour candidate, polling the second highest independent vote in British political history. And he built an organisational infrastructure in so doing that has become the progressive movement which we now call Majority. There is so much more to Jamie, but I will leave it at that for now, except to say he is one of the sharpest, most deeply thoughtful people I have come across in electoral politics. Easily up there with Mamdani and AOC and Abdul El-Sayed in the US.

Manda: And he’s here today with us on the podcast because he’s brought out a new paper called Hostage Nation, which does something quite remarkable. It takes the existing system in the UK and with only a few well-placed tweaks, almost all of which require no new legislation, it creates a new system that would work for people and planet. It’s not total systemic change, it’s the first step that we need to go from where we are to where we need to be, if we’re going to see the emergent system that you and I both want to dream into being. I cannot emphasise too highly how innovative and necessary this is. It’s the beginning step to a future that works for everyone, wherever you are and whoever you are. If you’re listening to this in the UK, it would make your life measurably better within a year, significantly better in four years, and utterly transformed in a decade. If you’re outside the UK, bringing the principles of this into your own nation would do the same. This is common sense. Politics worked out in detail, and I totally recommend that you read the website, sign up for more details, read as much of the paper as you can; it’s not short.

Manda: It says it’s two hours reading, and that’s only if you don’t stop to think about it. But it is worth it. Figure out what of this you can get your head around, that you can talk about to people, and then go out and talk about it. This is the only way we are going to make change. And Jamie really unpicks that in the episode you’re about to hear. So on that topic, Jamie and I were scheduled to have an hour’s conversation. At the end of the first hour it was blindingly obvious that there was at least one more hour and actually closer to two in the conversation. So Jamie has outstanding generosity of spirit in an incredibly busy life; he agreed to carry on recording. So we split the conversation. The first episode is broadly about politics (that’s this one) and how we might change it. The next one focuses much more deeply on the Hostage Nation paper. So here we go. Open your ears, be prepared to have your life changed! People of the podcast, please welcome Jamie Driscoll of Majority, of the Green Party and author of Hostage Nation.

Manda: Jamie Driscoll. Welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. I have been looking forward to this for so long. Thank you. How are you and where are you on this quite nice September morning?

Jamie: It is a beautiful warm morning here as well. I’m in Newcastle, which is where I live, where I’ve lived for decades. Um, I’m doing very well actually. I’ve been off social media for the summer, because I’ve been doing a deep dive into how we fix Britain’s economy. And I’m training for a marathon next year, so I’m actually feeling pretty healthy in myself.

Manda: Fantastic. Which marathon?

Jamie: The Athens marathon.

Manda: Good lord.

Jamie: It’s a tough course, but it’s the one that actually started in Marathon, the very first.

Manda: Wow. And you’re not going to die of heat stroke halfway round?

Jamie: It’s a bit hot there, yeah, but it’s in November so it’s not too bad. I’ve got over a year to train.

Manda: With any luck, the El Nino will have burned itself out by then. We’ll all be okay. Yay! All right, so you’re up in the northeast and people outside the UK, this is a northeast accent, it’s absolutely gorgeous, make the most of it. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are in terms of… Okay, so in my view, you’re one of the sharpest political brains on what we would call the progressive, sane, left of British politics. And you’ve held a lot of high level posts where you’ve achieved a lot of stuff, and as a result, the establishment hates you. So give us the edited highlights of how you got to where you are.

Jamie: Um, well, I grew up in a very working class town called Middlesbrough. My dad was a tank driver in the Army and then a shift worker at ICI. My mother was a trade unionist and women’s officer. So it was actually a very strange dynamic in our house growing up. My older brother was in the Navy when the Falklands was on, thankfully out of harm’s way. So I was an engineer. Left school at 16, got an engineering degree as a mature student in my 20s. I ended up working as a CEO of a small tech company. Then in 2015, I got really back into politics. I’d been very involved in anti-fascist politics throughout my youth, also a black belt in jiu jitsu, and I did various kinds of roles that we don’t talk about, about dealing with the far right.

Manda: Interesting.

Jamie: So when that wave happened, it just so happened that I’d given up teaching jiu jitsu, which I’d been doing for 20 years, had time on my hands, got back into politics in a big way.

Manda: This was when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party.

Jamie: That’s right. That Corbyn wave. And I joined and ended up doing a lot of grassroots leadership work, a lot of organising, organised a big conference. And then was asked to be a councillor, became a councillor, won the city centre ward in Newcastle called Monument Ward, for labour. Then this new thing had occurred. Britain for the first time was getting regional mayors. And something was created called the North of Tyne Combined Authority. And this was where in theory the local authorities all get together and get new powers and money. But they were all labour authorities at the time and they all fell out. So only half of them made it over the line. By the time they did, one of them was Tory. I won the election by a landslide, but I was up against someone who was an Uber Blairite and he’s never forgiven me, but he was also the leader of Newcastle City Council. So he was in my cabinet, one of his allies was my cabinet. Mayors don’t get to choose who’s in their cabinets. Automatically, the leaders of the local authorities. And then the local Tory. So I had this really hostile cabinet. I managed to win people over for a program, a very progressive program. We were first to run a citizens assembly on climate change. We did loads of investment in green energy, and I renegotiated the deal with central government and got billions out of them. And we’re talking people here like Michael Gove and Simon Clark, you know, not even one nation Tories.

Manda: Not keen to give away billions.

Jamie: And it was so successful. And then the Labour Party, when I’d created this new authority, decided that I wasn’t allowed to run for it. And it’s actually quite flattering. They changed the rules of the Labour Party so that I wouldn’t automatically be long listed.

Manda: This was after Corbyn. We’re now in the Starmer era.

Jamie: Absolutely we are. Um so this is 2023. They changed the rules of the Labour Party so that they could remove me from the long list, which they then did, and afterwards invented this excuse that it was because I’d spoken to Ken Loach, the famous film maker. I know Ken, I’ve known him for years. He shot three films in the North East.

Manda: Right. So you’re going to talk to him?

Jamie: He’s a local hero. And so we were doing this sort of birthday celebration for the live theatre, this very much community driven, community wealth building model of a theatre in central Newcastle. And we were talking about his latest films. Then some months later when they blocked me, and the official, oh, he’s an anti-Semite because he spoke to Ken Loach, who once stood next to a bloke in a queue who once said something bad.

Manda: His cousin’s hamster might have once posted something on Twitter that we don’t like. Right.

Jamie: Um, exactly. And there was outrage. Everybody could see how silly it was. And, you know, the interesting thing Manda was local Tories, national Tories, people from across politics, mainstream commentators said what? We know Jamie, he’s just someone who gets stuff done.

Manda: Yeah, right. Good for the region, regardless of what your policies are. Yes.

Jamie: Well, absolutely. And then I got general secretary of the unions get in touch saying go on son, run, run. And everybody locally did. So we ran an independent campaign. But during the time they’d changed the voting system, because it used to be this method called supplementary vote, where you’d vote for your first choice and your second choice. The Tories, nothing to do with me, had got rid of that. And so it actually became first past the post. And because a lot of people were worried about the Tories, then…

Manda: They voted Labour.

Jamie: Labour picked up a lot of the votes. But I got more votes than the Tories, Reform, Liberal Democrats, put together. And if it had been a supplementary vote I may well have won. And this is before the general election. So this is May ’24, just before the general election in July, when everybody was so sick of Truss, Sunak, Johnson and everyone that they just wanted them out. Things have changed and now they’re so sick of labour they don’t want anyone in; which is where we are.

Manda: Yes. Okay. But in the meantime, you didn’t make it as mayor and you then did what? Because I think that trajectory is quite interesting too.

Jamie: Yeah, there was obviously a need. And lots of people are wise after the event, but I published this and you can go back and read the old articles, saying that Labour are going to get into power, they’re going to make a mistake. They have no plan. And I saw the inside workings of them having no plan; at one point in a shadow cabinet speed dating session when we were setting policy, maybe come back to that later.

Manda: Yes!

Jamie: And I was saying, look, they’re going to get into power, they’re going to make a mess of it, they’re going to become really unpopular. That opens the door to all of the reactionary forces, because once you stop talking about policy, once you stop talking about what you’re actually going to do, and it all becomes about vibes, well, then it’s whoever puts out the catchiest meme on social media. And that’s a dangerous place to be in. I believe in a fact based approach.

Manda: But not if you’re against people who are targeting the amygdala. The Facts don’t matter when your limbic system moves ten times faster than your cortex, it’s just you’re not going to win.

Jamie: That’s right. Yeah. So I set up something called Majority, which is still running and people can join and we do political education and training mainly. So it’s very pluralist. So we’ve got a few people still in the Labour party, lots of greens, a few people who went to Your Party which didn’t really work out and have come back. Lots of people who are in nothing and love it. Lots of Extinction Rebellion, lots of Palestinian solidarity people. And what I think we’ve really nailed is the culture. It’s very pluralist. People disagree in depth, but very respectfully. There’s a lot of humour, a lot of warmth. And it’s great and it works. And the mission is to get citizens to become activists and activists to become leaders. Because I think we have a serious leadership crisis in the left of British politics.

Manda: And I tried to join Majority. It seems to be at the moment it’s limited to the northeast. Or did I misunderstand?

Jamie: No. You can join from anywhere, but most of the in-person events are in the northeast. That’s where our membership density is highest. But we’ve just launched an online book group. First one of that’s on 22nd of September.

Manda: What book are you reading?

Jamie: Uh, we’re doing a book called The Way of the Activist, which wasn’t chosen by me even though I wrote it.

Manda: Aha! That’s right. You’ve got a kind book group. Okay, The Way of the Activist. We need that in the show notes.

Jamie: What it is, it’s a series of very short articles, like 3 or 4 pages, 800 words, that are fantastic prompts for discussion. So we’ll cover the basics of a social psychology issue; what is the most persuasive way to argue? Something simple like, well, what causes inflation? So it’s that sort of people’s PPE basics.

Manda: Interesting. Okay. Yes. Because having read your Hostage Nation, I have some disagreements on the Inflation Act. But anyway, that’s geeky, let’s not get to that now. Okay. So you’ve got Majority and at the same time you’ve joined the Green Party.

Jamie: That’s right.

Manda: I would be really interested in the overlap between Majority and the Green Party, because they seem to me as if they occupy a similar conceptual space. Majority is more geographically limited and the Green Party is UK wide in its various iterations. Talk to us about that.

Jamie: Yeah. So I joined the Green Party the back end of last year, 2025. A lot of the local greens had been asking me to join for a long time. I’d supported them and campaigned for a number of them over the years. So there was quite a close relationship. I’ve never been particularly tribal, and always found that if you can find people who agree with you, work together to achieve something. So the door was open, they were very keen, asked me to come in. Local elections in Newcastle last year, all out elections, so this is where every seat is up for election. For people unfamiliar with British local government, sometimes 1 in 3 seats are up in a year, Sometimes all of them are if there’s been a boundary shift. So in the North East, Sunderland, County Durham, Gateshead, South Tyneside, all fell to be Reform councils. Newcastle has remained this defiant model where we got 23 green councillors elected, up from well two in the previous election, then a by election, then a defection. A lot of new people. So they very much welcomed my experience of how to navigate these things, you know, someone who’s led a combined authority for years.

Manda: But you didn’t stand as a candidate. Were you fed up of the whole process of going back to the bottom of the ladder?

Jamie: No I stood in my old ward of Monument, and got far more votes than I ever got for the Labour Party, won by a landslide. So yes I’m now a Green Party councillor.

Manda: Oh, okay. So you’re a councillor now, I hadn’t realised. Oh, I’m so sorry. Right. Excellent. And are you running the council yet?

Jamie: We as a group decided that we wouldn’t run it as a minority administration or in a coalition. So we are engaged in a process of constructive opposition, where we work with the Lib Dems who’ve got one more seat than us, Reform got the same number of seats as us. And keeping the balance of power that way. Yeah.

Manda: Interesting. Alrighty. Until one of the Lib Dems defects to you, in which case then you have a majority.

Jamie: Yeah. Or more likely, this May’s elections.

Manda: Okay. You’ve got some more churn going on. Alrighty. So many ways I want to take this. Before we go any further, you have somewhere, and I have too many tabs open to find it immediately, defined yourself as a democratic socialist rather than a social democrat. And I think given Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed and AOC and all of the people in the US and now in the UK, could you give us the edited highlights, the elevator pitch for the difference between a democratic socialist and a social Democrat? Because that’s not something I have ever understood.

Jamie: I will certainly try. And everybody listening will disagree in some measure.

Manda: Ok, fair enough. Yeah. Like economics then.

Jamie: Yeah. So social democracy starts from the point of view that you are going to have essentially a market driven economy, and you’re going to use the power of the state to smooth off some of the most egregious inequalities.

Manda: So it’s basically predatory capitalism with a slightly fluffier look. And it waves a pink flag or a pride flag or a trans flag and…

Jamie: It has a spectrum. So you can go right back to, say, the 1950s, the Macmillan government in the UK. Actually they built a load of council houses, more than any government before or since. But you can then have quite radical social democracy, as the Attlee government, particularly driven by Nye Bevan, creating the NHS and bringing the mines and the docks and the electricity, all of these things into public ownership, which is the more radical side of social democracy.

Manda: Okay. And why is that not democratic socialist?

Jamie: Well, democratic socialism looks from the other point of view. And it says, rather than accepting this steady state, which you’ve forever got to correct and push back so that it’s not doing damage, why don’t we have a model where the centre of gravity moves towards working in the interests of basically the people who do the work? The proletariat, the working class, wherever you want to call them. Why don’t we have it that way, and then have a large amount of individual freedoms? You want to set up a restaurant, set up a restaurant, you know, nobody minds that. But when you have your water companies owned by people whose job it is to maximise shareholder profit.

Manda: It’s not surprising that it’s a disaster.

Jamie: Yeah, you can put a regulator in place, but it’s all going to go wrong. So that’s the difference. It’s which side of the tipping point do you sit?

Manda: Okay. Fair enough. I want to explore that in more depth in a bit, but I don’t want to get too geeky too soon. So we exist, I would say at a number of tipping points at the moment. Whatever we think of the concept of technology and the singularity, given the general hockey stick exponential curve of technology, we are, I would say now, in the singularity. Where it’s basically vertical with respect to the x axis. I had a definition back in 2012 that the BBC managed to lose off our local radio station, where I’d written a book about 2012 and they said, oh, well, so is the end happening? And I said basically, yes. At the point when we design and build the technology that can design and build its own successor, then we are redundant in the evolution of a particular form of intelligence and it probably isn’t going to go very well. And I would say we are there or extremely close. At the same time, we’re reaching geophysical tipping points. Oceanic, planetary, which are running us up very hard against the edge of the cliff of the sixth mass extinction. At the same time, we’re hitting political tipping points where all of the straits are now shut, thank you, Donald Trump. And oil prices are going to hit a similar vertical curve. And because we currently exist in a fossil fuel based economy, that’s going to do extremely bad things to our capacity to move stuff around, make things, everything. And we’re hitting El Nino, so we’re going to hit food shortages. Do you listen to James Meadway’s Macrodose?

Jamie: I talk to James, but I don’t.

Manda: Oh, you talk to James a lot. Okay, so James is one of my heroes. And according to a recent Macrodose, the heads of all of the supermarkets in the UK went to the government recently and said it’s when, not if, we have a food crisis. And their estimate is November. So things are looking pretty shaky. And we have a government that, as far as I can tell, is arguing how many angels can dance on the head of its fiscal pin. And one of the basic premises of this podcast is the current system is not fit for purpose, if that purpose is the continuation of complex life on earth. Which is setting a pretty low bar. And they seem to be living up to that quite well. And way back in June, I was curious as to why your Facebook had gone very quiet. And of course, it’s because you were writing Hostage Nation. You wrote: “Andy Burnham’s back in Westminster. He’ll soon be prime Minister. Which Andy turns up remains to be seen. And that in part will determine how much of a honeymoon he gets. If he guns for the privatised utilities, if he invests in council housing and public transport, as he should, the establishment will target him. If he sits on the fence over Gaza, Palestine Action or the EU, his coalition of voters will start to break apart. He’s one of the best communicators in politics. He can seem to offer everyone a little bit of hope. But as Prime Minister, you are judged on actions. And as we all know, when there is a disparity between what you say and what you do, what you do counts every single time”.

Manda: And I am looking at someone who looks like Starmer with a slightly different coloured tie and slightly better PR, and if he makes McSweeney lord McSweeney, I will revise all of that back to its just Starmer with the same people pulling the strings. And partly you’ve been in the room with things, and my assumption is that Mossad runs our government currently. You may think otherwise, but it acts as if that were the case. And they don’t seem to be in any way revising their views. We have seen over the weekend, over the last two weekends, masked thugs in black causing actual structural damage and actual infrastructure chaos at our ports, And mostly been watched and nothing happened. Whereas little old ladies holding placards are arrested by the hundreds and are occupying prison spaces that we don’t have. And nobody seems to think this is a bad idea. Actually. David Alan Green, who is one of the most efficient communicators of constitutional law I’ve come across, thinks it’s an extremely bad idea, and has put a really good post in Prospect magazine that I will put in the show notes. You wrote that or you posted it on the 24th of June. We are now recording today on the 14th of September, so we’re a few months in. Where do you think Burnham is actually going? Who’s pulling his strings and what could he do in the face of the fact that Reform has just gained £100 million from crypto billionaires? No repetition, no hesitation, you have the next hour, Jamie!

Jamie: Just solve world politics, please Jamie.

Manda: Yes, please. That would be good. Yes. You’re one of the few people I think could do that. So let’s go.

Jamie: Well, I think the most important thing is to frame this correctly. And I’ll come back to something called tactical optimism. But Noam Chomsky was talking to Andrew Marr a few years ago, and he was saying to Andrew Marr that you are only able to say certain things. Andrew Marr says, no, no, I’m able to say what I want. And Noam Chomsky says, no, Andrew.

Manda: You wouldn’t have your job.

Jamie: The only reason you’re in that job is because of the things you will voluntarily say. If you were going to say something else, they wouldn’t have put you in that job. So that’s the dynamic you’ve got to understand, is actually it’s not Mossad’s fingers all over it. It’s actually their worry about how they come across. All of us have this inside us. All of us have grown up with, you can use simple Freudian models of Id, ego superego. You know.

Manda: We’re in the IFS model on this podcast. But yes.

Jamie: Yeah yeah, yeah. But, you know, I’ve got this image of what approval is, and it may come from fathers or priests or whatever, or your voter base.

Manda: The Daily Mail.

Jamie: Indeed. And one of the things is that establishment sources tend to weigh more heavily with most people. And a lot of these people crave being taken seriously. You know, they actually really value the honorary doctorates that they get. And that is a big part of it.

Manda: So we’re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction and they care about honorary doctorates. Please tell me that’s not true Jamie.

Jamie: I’ve had this conversation with a number of political leaders, and it’s worth understanding these are individual human beings. Humans are great at thinking rationally when they have time to step back and evaluate. And we’re very bad at thinking rationally when we’re under pressure. And there’s a very strong evolutionary drive for that. There’s not much point in negotiating with a bear that’s trying to eat you, you know, run or pick up something hard and hit it. And they’re your two options, basically.

Manda: Yeah. And we’re always under pressure.

Jamie: If we think about someone like Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is clearly not, he may be very foolish, but he’s clearly not a stupid man. He’s quite capable of passing bar exams. And yet he took donations for £2500 for a pair of glasses, for 15 grand for a suit, and then wrote in the register that he’d done that. That is an incredibly irrational act. Why would someone do that? Because once it’s written in the register, you know the press are going to be all over it. And then when challenged on it says, oh, if I’m going to go to Highbury, I need security guards. What that is, that’s a man under tremendous emotional pressure and his inner desires come out. And he’s inner desire is I’m someone of status and I should be treated as such. And that’s the mistake he makes. We all have our blind spots. That’s what we see with Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage, although he’s a racist, is primarily someone who thinks he should be an oligarch. Which is why he hangs around with oligarchs, which is why he can take a £5 million donation. And it didn’t register that that was a political threat to him. And so he tells silly lies about it because he’d never actually needed to justify it to himself because, well, I’m an oligarch, I deserve this. Which is why he went chasing after Trump. With Andy, Andy is someone who is genuinely a nice guy and feels genuinely affronted when he comes under pressure of ‘yes, but you’re just a neoliberal’ or whatever else might be flying around. But he doesn’t think he is. He thinks he’s a nice guy, doing his best in a difficult circumstance.

Manda: So did Blair. You know that famous comment of people think that I’m a good person or words to that effect.

Jamie: “I honestly did what I thought was right”, was Blair’s famous quote. And I know it’s Golding’s law, but so did Adolf Hitler. It’s not a defence in law.

Manda: Yes quite.

Jamie: And so this is where it comes back down to actually is what is somebody’s foundational beliefs? A little bit like we’re talking about democratic socialism versus social democracy. And if you look at someone like Andy, he grew up through the Blair years. He worked for Tessa Jowell, he was a minister in the Blair government. That was in the days when, because of the financial bubble, there seemed to be an opportunity for that social democratic model to make some people’s lives better in many ways. And so if that’s your formative period and you’ve never really looked at, well, what are the real causes of wealth extraction? What are the drivers of exceeding planetary boundaries? If you haven’t thought about it in those terms, then when you come out and say, oh, I’ve made bus fares a bit cheaper, you actually think that’s good. What you don’t realise is that yes, but we’ve now got 3 million people needing food handouts in this country. Is that not actually outweighing your feel good about making bus fares 50p cheaper? You know, you’re tinkering around the edges. And that theory of change, of how would you shift it? Can you do it by asking some very rich people to be a bit nicer? Because you can ask them to be a bit nicer. And some of them will be. Will that shift the dial enough to prevent mass extinction? Should actually be the question that you’re really evaluating. And what did we get? We got three emergency broadcasts saying “oh be careful lighting barbecues”.

Manda: Yes, yes. All right. I could rant about that for a while. Let’s not. Because the mismatch. So you and I, I’m assuming, are aware that we’re in a poly crisis. That time is very short. I don’t know what your time frames are, but Jason Coxon, who left Anthropic last week, said, AI is going to kill us within a decade. And actually, I was listening to Indy Johar last week, I was at a gathering of animist systems change people, which are my people. It’s very niche. But we were there. And Indy’s time frame is a lot shorter than that and with good reason. And yet there is still time to shift the bus from the edge of the cliff. But the time narrows and narrows and narrows the more the people to whom we have given power appear not to be aware that there is any kind of emergency at all. So we’re in a world where the Environment Minister, Angela Eagle, said a couple of days ago: “If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t. Some of it is that kind of preparation for just being a bit more resilient”. Which actually doesn’t make sense if you parse it out. But let’s assume people just speak what’s at the top of their head. We are at the point of fiddling while Rome burns, being a very poor metaphor for not even beginning to address what’s going on. And my guess is they don’t want to create the kind of panic buying that we saw in the pandemic, with people fighting each other in the aisles over toilet tissue. But there’s no plan.

Manda: There’s no there’s no acknowledgement of what’s happening and there seems to be no planning for it. There doesn’t even seem to be a planning for social democracy. And so two questions. One is, do you think Burnham has a plan? Second, do you think he is aware of where we’re at and he’s just choosing not to do anything? Third, if the answer is no to number two, how do we communicate to the people who currently could do something, the need to do something that isn’t just worrying about the ministerial car or the type of suit that they’re wearing.

Jamie: I think what I’ll do is I’ll tell you how politics works.

Manda: Please do.

Jamie: It’ll probably help more than anything else.

Manda: And then how we can make it work better. Which is the key.

Jamie: Yeah. The fundamental mistake is to assume that any government or political party will act rationally. It’s not because these are individually stupid people, it is because organisations cannot act as a single collective mind. The behaviour is emergent from the competing and conflicting and occasionally overlapping objectives of those who are in it. So politics runs on two clocks. It runs on the news cycle; and so everything is driven about what was in the story. And you’ve got this really quite dysfunctional relationship between the media and politics, both of whom need each other, neither of whom actually have treated each other very well, so there’s huge distrust. And yet you get individual actors who are quite capable of building useful relationships with certain journalists, certain publications. And I’ve built effective relationships.

Manda: Like Johnson and Kuenssberg

Jamie: There’s a whole host of them. But you know, I have good relationships with some journalists as well. Because if you talk to them and you treat them with a bit of respect.

Manda: As human beings.

Jamie: And answer their bloody questions.

Manda: Right, then you’re going to stand out because so few people do that.

Jamie: You’ve marked yourself out.

Manda: Zack Polanski seems to answer questions actually.

Jamie: There’s a few of them do. I mean, one of the things that John McDonnell did very well, although he was labelled as this dangerous leftie, he would just give people an answer. And I thought actually, you know what, mate? That automatically marks you out as better than 90% of the people who came before you, even if I disagree with you. I never had any problem with the right wing press. All of these people actually quite liked talking to me and would say so and say nice things about me, because I sounded like I knew my stuff. And I would like to think I do know my stuff, although, you know, it’s obviously a matter of objective analysis. So one clock is the news cycle. The other clock is the electoral cycle. One of these runs in hours and days, the other one runs in years, but then months as you get closer to it. Solving problems runs in years to decades. So there is no clock about actually fixing things. There was one cabinet minister I was talking to, Ex-cabinet minister, and he says, Jamie, you get really excited when you come into power and you walk into your office. You know, you’ve been building your whole career to this and you start pulling on the levers of power. And he says, after about two years you realise the levers aren’t connected to anything.

Jamie: So if you were going to do something like retrofit every home in Britain so that it’s insulated, so we’re not heating the sky, it’s the cheapest way and it’s also the most environmentally sound way. So there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do it. It’s because nobody’s actually looked at it and thought, oh, we could do that in ten years. Because they’re thinking, yeah, what good is that? We’ll be out of power by then. You know, we don’t want to give the other lot a free gift. And it’s classic game theory. If everybody tries to maximise their own utility, then it’s dysfunctional for everybody. And I’ve used this phrase before; it is an iron law of politics that people will act in their own self-interest. The job of a progressive politician is to get people to act in their enlightened self-interest. Sometimes we have to all wait in the queue because we’ll get through the door faster than if everybody pushes. But that is not an argument for politely waiting. That is an argument for when someone tries to push in the queue to shout “Oi! Back of the queue, mate”. That’s the game theory model.

Manda: All right, I hear you on this. But when we watch the right, they have a slightly different game theory model, which is we’re going to do whatever we want to do. It doesn’t matter whether we have a mandate or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s within the law or not. We’re going to do it and see who can stop us. And this is something that strikes me. We’re not getting PR. The Labour Party has an 80 seat majority. If the Parliamentary Labour Party were on board with it, and that’s a whole separate other question, because most of them seem to me to be Tories in slightly different coloured ties. But let’s presume that everybody got to the point where the only way to not have a Reform government next time would be to have PR, they could vote it through tomorrow. And they could replace the Lords with a Citizens Assembly tomorrow. And they’re not doing it because they all sit there going, well, we don’t have a mandate for that. Blair had it in his policies way back in ’79. PR was there. You know, people did vote him in. So it kind of was there in the historical mandate. But we also know that if Nigel Farage were to win, he will come in and he will do whatever his billionaire backers tell him to do, regardless of the mandate.

Manda: And he will wield the army and the police and the courts and everything else to make sure it gets through. And this gets us back to Steve Bannon, who was asked in 2011, I think, by Michael Moore, in the filming for Fahrenheit 9/11, which Bannon then told him not to put out. But the scripts are online. And Michael said, why does the Right always win? And Bannon said two things. One: there is nothing we will not do to achieve the ends that we want. And we know what our ends are, which is white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy along the lines of the Inquisition, because that’s the last time things were run right. And two: we are going for headshots, and you are all still in a pillow fight. And I’m watching pillow fighting happening in Westminster, like there is not an emergency and Reform is not waiting just outside the door with the machine guns ready. And I completely get what you’re saying. How do we shift this, Jamie? Because it’s not fit for purpose. This system is not going to get us out of the poly crisis.

Jamie: Well, I think there’s a couple of things there. I think one, um, that you’ve probably misidentified who is in Parliament. The people in Parliament are not the left.

Manda: No, no no I didn’t think they were. No no no I think they are Tories in other coloured ties.

Jamie: Yeah. So why would they be the ones to challenge?

Manda: Do you think they want a Reform government next time?

Jamie: Yeah but they they’d be fine. They’ve got the directorships lined up. I mean when was the last time you saw a poor ex MP?

Manda: Okay. That is assuming the status quo is a status quo and it’s not.

Jamie: Indeed. And it never has been. One of the most dangerous ideas in economics is the idea of equilibrium, that everything moves back to the centre. It doesn’t and it never has. What you do have is oscillations sometimes, but oscillation can just be something getting bigger and bigger until it falls over. So in terms of rationality, you then get back to the individual actor versus the collective problem. If you are a Labour MP who sees this, what actions can you take? Well, if you go against the party, the whips will have a go at you. You may end up being deselected.

Manda: You could join the Greens.

Jamie: You could. But that then means, ooh, are the greens actually going to win? If your objective is self-interest.

Manda: Okay. And you’re interested in simply being an MP because you like the salary and you like being in this bizarre bear pit.

Jamie: Well, partly cognitive dissonance reduction has kicked in. Nobody likes to believe that they are both ineffective and nasty. So they have to believe that they’re good people and they have to believe they’re effective people. And that leads to the conclusion I’m better off being a dented Shield Labour MP than going back to a career in the private sector, if you are interested in some sort of public good. That leads us to the situation where you will see a lot of MPs and Labour mayors saying, look, look what we’ve done; we’ve spent some money here to get a small number of kids out of poverty.

Manda: Yes. Or £0.50 less on the bus fares, which is now a placeholder for doing something that isn’t a bad thing and is completely not matching the needs at the moment.

Jamie: And that’s the issue. Yeah. So how many actually think on a systems thinking basis? And the left are actually just as guilty of this kind of thinking, albeit from a much more benevolent approach. Oh, I’ll tell you what, we’ll nationalise everything. Okay, I’m in favour of that if certain other things follow on from it. But nationalisation; well, the mines were in public ownership throughout the miners strike. The Royal Bank of Scotland was publicly owned after the financial crash, didn’t change the way it operated, and the Post Office was publicly owned all the way through the Horizon crisis. It’s not enough to tinker around the edges. But radical change can only start from where you are. And that’s the strength of thrutopia. It’s about looking from where we are to how we get to where we want to be. Not, oh, you know what? I wouldn’t start from here, mate. It’s not an argument.

Manda: Yes, a giant leap. Exactly. Yes. Okay. So we’ve got to here. If you are crafting the route from here to where we need to get to, and the Hostage Nation is clearly part of it, what are the steps you would take? Let’s assume Burnham turns up at your doorstep and says, okay, I can see things are not good, and my current set of advisors are frankly locked in the old paradigm. I need you, Jamie, to walk us through this in a way that will navigate a legacy media that is innately hostile, will navigate an international collapse of the old order. Will navigate the biophysical tipping points that we’re heading up against, will navigate the tech tipping points we’re heading up against, and we’ll bring the majority of people with us so that we have some kind of democracy as we go forward. Now fix international politics. We have as long as you need.

Jamie: Yeah. In five minutes.

Manda: We can split this into two podcasts. If it takes two whole podcasts to fix international politics, Jamie, that’s completely fine. Go for it.

Jamie: So I’ll tackle these in separate silos even though they interact. So the thing that Hostage Nation does, is it makes the phrase ‘we can’t afford it’ unusable in British politics. We can afford it. We’ve got loads of money. It’s all over the place.

Manda: We print the money.

Jamie: We do that. But not only that, it’s already extant. We don’t have to print any. A little bit, maybe, in certain circumstances, you know, if there’s another Covid crisis. But the money is already there. It’s just at the moment propping up asset bubbles rather than being used to do something productive. So that’s why houses are unaffordable. Actually we’ve got a higher number of houses per capita than we’ve ever had. It’s just the banking system has now got so much money behind it that it lends people eight times their salary. When I was growing up, it was three and a half times your salary and so that’s where house prices kept to, for example. So there’s loads of money out there in pensions in ISAs. Always take a route that will pick you the fewest fights possible, but that still gets your job done. One of the things that actually a lot on the right make the same mistake, is they’ll have a go at someone because it makes them feel good. Some on the left do it as well. And you got to think, no, we need to be a bit more disciplined than that. Is our objective to win? Or is our objective to, you know, get a bit of revenge. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Manda: Also, we’re all going to die. You know, fundamentally, we’re facing extinction.

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s loads of money. What the real constraint is in terms of operational results is what’s known as real capacity restraints. Do we have enough engineers and surveyors and cost accountants and project managers and all the things that go with actually building the things we need to build? Such as a completely clean energy grid. It’s so much cheaper, nobody has to pay the wind to blow. It’s just there. With modern battery technology, not just lithium ion, which has got very severe constraint results, but to get a bit geeky, something called technological readiness level, which means it can be rolled out. We’re there with things like sodium batteries. They use salt, and if they leak, you won’t be able to grow flowers in your garden until the rain washes it out. That’s the worst that happens. And we’ve got iron air batteries and they just rust. You know, it’s perfectly environmentally safe. So we can store all the electricity. So there’s a route through there. If we start to invest in retrofit, what that will do is cut our energy bills right down, cut the demand right down, and people won’t be freezing. And it will save the NHS a fortune and all the figures have gone through in Hostage Nation.

Manda: Tell us a little bit about, I think it was Sunderland, who invested the GPS could prescribe that. Because that blew my mind. And why is not everybody doing that? Tell us about that.

Jamie: So there was a study done in Sunderland, which is just down the road from where I live in. In 2016 this was published. And it was a social housing provider called Gen2 had done this experiment where they retrofitted the homes of people. They put double glazing in. They put a new boiler in. In those days a lot of these houses had old fashioned sort of immersion heaters, not instant hot water. And they found that not only did everybody’s heating bill come down and they’re wasting less power, but the emergency admissions to hospital for cold and damp related breathing diseases fell by 25%. Gp appointments fell by 60%. Now it’s very expensive to have an emergency admission, it runs to the thousands of pounds. And that study found that for this very narrow measure of how much it saved in health costs, for every pound you invested on retrofit, you saved £0.42 to the cost of the NHS. Now you’ve got other effects coming in there. Anyone with some knowledge of economics understands something called a multiplier. So if I spend money that’s kind of the last I see of it, you know, and I get whatever I’ve bought in return.  It doesn’t work like that for the government or an economy, because one person’s spending is another person’s income.

Manda: Exactly.

Jamie: So if the government pays a load of people to go and retrofit homes, well, those people pay tax and the government gets 40% of it back immediately. And that’s the Obr’s own figure. But then it cycles through the economy because they then go and spend it on their high street, and they’re paying the business rates of the pub they pull a pint in, and the wages of the lad who pulls the pint, some of which then goes back to the government, and you create this virtuous cycle of the money going round the economy. At the moment, that money is not going into useful things like affordable housing, like a good public transport system, like the public luxury, for example, of having more tree cover in our city centres. So that when we get another summer of heat spikes, which we’re going to get, actually, we have some nature doing the job for us of cooling it, rather than having to go inside, complain and turn air conditioning on. So they’re the solutions. What stops us is the politics.

Manda: But just before we go to that, so Sunderland set it up such that the GPS could prescribe having your house retrofitted as part of a prescription. And they did that?

Jamie: They did that as a pilot.

Manda: Oh, was it just a pilot? Oh, I didn’t understand that.

Jamie: It was just a pilot.

Manda: And why is that not rolled out everywhere? Is this because the lack of joined up thinking? Of the council is paying, or somebody is paying the five grand, or not the people who are saving the large amounts of money that they were saving because people’s health improved?

Jamie: That’s exactly the reason, Manda. Yeah. So in October ’21, I published a paper called Regional Wealth Generation. And this was part of my intellectual assault on the Treasury, to get them to give us fiscal devolution. And it actually it did work, some of it was written into the devo deal. But because there’s nobody there to champion it, it’s just lying on a shelf, getting covered in dust at the moment. As we’ve said, the current incumbent is more interested in having photographs taken than doing any work.

Manda: Also not very smart. I mean, part of the problem is we put people into positions that they are not intellectually capable of handling.

Jamie: What was interesting, was a journalist asked me during the independent campaign, was interviewing me, and then just said, just while we were chatting, he says, you know, they had to get rid of you. They had to. You are far too dangerous. You are showing that this works. If you show this works, then they’ve run out of arguments for not doing it.

Manda: I’m very worried about Mamdani in New York for exactly that reason. He’s fulfilled all of his promises inside six months, with bells on and fiscally neutral. And that’s going to frighten a lot of people, because it shows it can be done. We have a separate concept about narratives. Go on. Yes.

Jamie: So we do have the money. What we have to do is very quickly start rewiring the financial system. This is not particularly radical.

Manda: Really isn’t actually.

Jamie: The average saver wouldn’t even notice. So all the money, for example, that goes into ISAs or pensions, we get tax relief on. At the moment most of that is investing in Silicon Valley. Why are we as British taxpayers subsidising investment for American corporations?

Manda: Or the military.

Jamie: All we have to do is change the incentives, and those incentives can go to retrofitting homes, improving public transport, building council houses, all of which work for the British economy. And create jobs. So that our kids have an opportunity to have a career. Now, that is the sort of thing that reduces the political friction instead of increasing it. When we as environmentalists argue, you know, oh, you must walk or you must turn your heating down. People think I don’t want to walk, I don’t want to turn my heating down. So that’s actually not the case. Insulate the home and you will turn your heating down anyway. So this is what I mean.

Manda: Provide decent public transport and you won’t need to have a car that spends 80% of its time stationary on your drive.

Jamie: That’s right. Yeah, I mean, as an engineer I’m always astounded by the thermodynamics of it. You get a 75 kilogram human, takes a 1500 kilo steel box for a walk every time they go to the shops. I mean, why? Why can’t we just get on something where we go with other people that’s already running? So why wasn’t it done was your question. And in the regional wealth generation paper, what I highlighted, and this was when I was negotiating for transport powers. If I create a transport system that gets thousands of people out of their cars, because actually it works for them because it’s reliable and it’s fast and they don’t have to worry about somewhere to park and they can go out for a drink after work. Health will massively increase, obesity will fall and all those right related diseases. But I won’t see the money for it. That will be a saving on the NHS. So where is the incentive for someone to spend their budget on it, if somebody else is getting the benefit? And I proposed a joined up method where you just get a researcher, I’d be happy to borrow against it, take the risk, and then say look, if I get this many people, then you will give me the money because we’ve proved that it’s going to get the saving. So that’s the kind of rewiring and it’s very boring and it’s very dull and it doesn’t make a good chant on a march. You know, we want stretch related performance targets connected to fiscal goals.

Manda: Okay. Yeah you’re right. But Mariana Mazzucato in my understanding, has has talked to the Labour Party. They understand about joined up thinking. And that wasn’t even having to come to talk to Jamie Driscoll, who presumably they all hate because you do show them up. It seems we have a treasury that is still functioning on the mindset of the 18th century. So your Hostage Nation kind of begins to address this. It addresses ways that the Treasury could change what it does. If Burnham came to you tomorrow, my answer would be you just sack everybody and you start again. And I have no doubt that reform would do that. Pretty much this is what Trump did. You come in, you get rid of everybody you don’t like, you bring in the people you do like. But up to a point, if you have a concept of how things could be done differently, and the people who are actually holding the levers of power are going to slam their foot on the brake until you’re gone and they can go back to doing what they were doing; we have a system that’s not fit for purpose. Is there within a democratic nation, a reasonable way to change the mindset of people who genuinely don’t get it, and as far as I can tell, are not going to get it.

Jamie: There is. And I’ve done it and it works. So Andy read my regional wealth generation paper and started championing it.

Manda: While he was mayor of Manchester?

Jamie: While he was mayor of Manchester. We had various chats about it. He proposed some of the measures to transport for the North Board, when I was sitting next to him at one of these committees. But it’s about how many voices are whispering in your ear and what becomes top of your to do list.

Manda: Because everyone has limited bandwidth. That’s a thing.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah. You know, we are dealing with humans and we must never, ever forget that. So you’re right that that may well be what if you had a Reform or some successor of Reform kind of government, that that’s where they would go. But that’s what Trump tried. And it doesn’t actually work very well within that financial system. They don’t understand it any better. The thing about oligarchs is that we only see the ones who made it. We don’t see all the nutjobs who failed along the way.

Manda: We see plenty of nutjobs, though. And a lot of them are not very smart. And most of them started off by being very, very, very rich in a system that was designed to enrich the richest. And, you know, I have a theory which is slightly more radical than yours, which is the day the dollar becomes worth zero and we decide collectively to have a different currency, is the day Musk is just another guy and he’s not actually a very smart other guy. He can go off and take ketamine as much as he wants, and we can get on with running the world. And I am at the point where I don’t see anything less radical than a complete revamp of our fiscal, economic and monetary systems. You seem to think we can move with the system we’ve got and reconfigure it in time.

Jamie: I didn’t say in time. And that’s one of the things that Hostage Nation says, is it’s a race against the clock. And one of the things that we might not be able to fix is environmental degradation reaching a point where it’s irrecoverable with the resources that we have. The organisational resources that we have.

Manda: Well, also the material resources. Simon Michaud did a study where if the European Union’s visions of creating a non-fossil fuel based power infrastructure were actually to be realised, we would need 20 times, I think, the amount of copper that has been mined in the totality of human existence. And there isn’t that much copper. Well the Andes are all copper, but they’re very, very small amounts of copper and You’d have to flatten the Andes, mine the lot, and we don’t actually have the fossil fuel power to do that. We are going to hit material limits as well as climactic limits as well as sociological limits.

Jamie: Les than you might think. That same argument was used about batteries a few years ago.

Manda: Okay. And now we’ve got salt and iron.

Jamie: So you can use aluminium. The problem with aluminium and I have a degree in materials engineering, so I’m claiming special knowledge here.

Manda: Okay!

Jamie: The advantage of copper is it’s more dense, you can put it into a smaller cell on a wind turbine than aluminium. It works better in power transformers. But if you’re willing to accept a cheaper alternative that has to be a bit bigger or substantially bigger even, it still works. There are ways. And when the stakes on this are the survival of the planet, you’ll say, yeah alright.

Manda: You’ll find different ways. So at the moment there’s a two tonne neodymium magnet in every wind turbine. And that struck me as a rate limiting step. Are you seeing ways past that?

Jamie: Yeah, there’s any number of ways past all of these things. It’s a question of efficiency development. Most engineering challenges are have we had enough people playing around with this thing to make it work for long enough? We do not invest. And that is a fundamental problem of the financial system. To introduce a simple concept, there is something known as a hurdle rate. People won’t invest unless their rate of return is above it. So that is how much more you’re getting back than inflation. And all capital at the moment, almost all, there’s little things like GB energy has about a £5 billion budget, but in the scheme of things that will only make a dent. So they have to clear a hurdle rate. Now, if you have the option of doing share buybacks for Apple or investing in oil futures as the Straits of Hormuz open, close, open, close, then that’s where they’re going to put the capital. At the moment, our wind turbines are funded by that same global pool of capital and they say, hey, look, if I want enough back from this, you’re going to have to give me like £90 per megawatt hour, even though it only costs you £45 to actually make the electricity. I want the rest for lending you the capital to build it. That’s what Hostage Nation fixes. It uses the money we’ve already got in pensions, in savings. Instead of investing in Silicon Valley, you only get your tax break if you invest it in British productive, sustainable infrastructure.

Jamie: That solves that problem. It is solved mathematically. The constraint is political. And if Andy came knocking on my door and said, look, Jamie, I’ve seen the light. I want to be remembered for someone who actually tried to fix stuff and not just someone who had his three years as prime minister. How do we fix it? Well, I would say you’re going to find it difficult with the Labour Party you’ve got there, mate, to be honest. But this is what I was saying earlier, there is a leadership crisis in the left right. Some of that is because we never get anywhere near power. We’re frozen out. You know, I got there and they did the best to take me out. The Green Party, of which I’m a member and there’s some very, very good and extremely well informed people, but they don’t have the the political nous to know, look, you’ve got to be thinking about not getting a few extra MPs and a few extra councillors, you’ve got to be thinking about getting 80 to 100 MPs in 2029 so that when there’s a crisis, you’ve got a big enough voice of people who know what they’re doing that they could step in and take over.

Manda: So clearly we’ve got a fork in the road here. I’m really interested fundamentally in how do we fix politics and I think you have the ideas of how to do it. The current system is not fit for purpose and current economic system not fit for purpose and Hostage Nation really beautifully addresses that, in ways that I find very exciting. Possibly because economics excites me, which is quite sad. However, we’re going to fork this, guys. We’re going to have another podcast where we discuss Hostage Nation and how do we address the vigilante bond markets? And how do we make the existing economic system, which is absolutely not fit for purpose, how do we make it more fit for purpose as we transition to a better economic system? However, here, now, let’s go through that with politics.

Manda: So we have a problem that I would posit as the fact that AI spills a gallon of water just to tell everybody that I stuck my thumb up on YouTube. We need to bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power. And at the moment, we do neither. We have a political system that was designed in the 18th century, largely to give power to those who already had power and maintain that. And it does that with extreme efficiency and that’s not what our planet needs. So you’ve thought about this a lot. In the UK, we have first past the post and we had a two party system where basically the uni party swapped the colour of the ties and the colour of the rosettes, and that’s breaking apart now.

Manda: But we also have an insurgent right, which is pretending to be the party of the people, where in fact it is the system by which the oligarchs will claim power. And once they’ve got it, as Trump is demonstrating, they have no intention of ever letting it go. There was a brilliant book, I don’t know, did you read Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean? 2017. It’s a long story and it doesn’t matter, but she laid out in extreme detail how Thiel mainly then the Koch brothers, considered that freedom, their freedom and democracy were not compatible, and how to use the tools of democracy to destroy it from the inside and make sure that they had total freedom and nobody else had any freedom. And we are seeing that playing out. We want to make sure, I think, I would suggest, that we end up at a place where every single human being on the planet can fulfil their highest potential in collaboration with a flourishing ecosphere. Because destroying the ecosphere destroys everything, because we are all integral nodes in the web of life. How do we create a politics that heads us towards that? You have as long as you need, go for it.

Jamie: Let’s start with a few foundational facts. Left wing policies are popular. 74% of people in the UK support mass Council house building. 77% support wealth taxes on billionaires, 82% support public ownership of water. And despite the media reporting and hordes of online bots, 77% of Britons agree that transgender people should be protected from discrimination. So first of all, we are given this ecosphere, news ecosphere that no, no, no, you’re a bit of a freak for believing this.

Manda: The narrative is wrong.

Jamie: And that still hasn’t worked. So British politics has this weird dysfunctional love hate relationship between the media and the political class. So I want to introduce something called elaboration likelihood model. Now, this is a model of persuasion that is analysed through marketing and a whole range of things, not just politics. But it basically breaks it down to two things: facts versus vibes, if you like. So you get your celebrity standing there, or James bond with an Omega watch on in the film. It doesn’t say anything about that watch, nobody knows if it’s any better, but there’s a little bit of association and we see that in politics. Whose dad was a toolmaker?

Manda: Oh dear Lord. Okay. For people outside the UK, Keir Starmer said that in every single interview.

Jamie: So that is peripheral. Oh, he must be a decent bloke, his dad was a toolmaker.

Manda: Did anybody actually think that that you ever met?

Jamie: Well, they all thought he was a tool, so.

Manda: Well there’s that. Yes, yes.

Jamie: You know, Sadiq Khan’s dad was a bus driver. My dad was a tank driver. We used that. We did put it on there. But you’ve got all these shortcuts. And rather than listening to arguments, it also comes down to things like confidence. Nigel Farage comes across confident and he does this very easy. ‘Oh no, no, no you people don’t know what you’re talking about’ kind of line. And as long as people don’t evaluate the arguments, the person who’s best at the peripheral side will win. And Andy is very good at that, Andy Burnham. He’s a decent bloke, he comes across like a decent bloke. He’s just run the Great North run. Must be a decent bloke. Utterly irrelevant to the actions that people carry out. Now, where we address this is by taking what’s known as the central route. The central route is explaining the arguments and dealing with the facts. And all the research shows that the peripheral route is faster and less durable. It collapses very quickly.

Manda: Because you’re targeting amygdala instead of cortex.

Jamie: That’s right. And it’s overwritten almost immediately when the next person does that. And I’ll give you a real timeline. So 2019, County Durham, which had been Labour forever in the general election, four of the eight seats switched to the conservatives. And people thought, how is that possible? And then in the 2021 local elections, labour in power for 120 years, down to 50 seats out of 120. And you end up with this coalition of independents and Tories and Liberal Democrats. But then, in the 2024 general election, Labour landslide in all the seats. But then the year after that, in May’s local election, a Reform landslide! Had the people of Durham changed? It’s a place where people don’t move very much. So what had changed is oh, they’re the vibe people, they’re the vibe. Oh, I’m sick of them, we’re gonna have a go at them. They think it works. All their spin doctors think it works because they’re on a news cycle and an election cycle timetable. But when people go out in the park and it’s so full of glass their kids can’t play there, that’s actually the thing that persuades them. Who is there with a plan saying, here’s the evidence, here’s the numbers. If you vote for us, this is what we’ll do. Not vote for us because we’re lovely. So that’s what we’ve got to build. We need political organisation. I think the Green Party is the vehicle for that. I think the people who joined the Green Party agree with that. I know Zack agrees with that, I’ve had conversations with him about it. But as an organisation, it hasn’t yet got its structures in place to do that. So, far too dependent on one leader who’s a good performer, but it’s easy to assassinate one leader. If you have a team of people that look like a government in waiting, advocating for this stuff, who’ve got the facts at their fingertips, then that’s when you start to see a change. That’s how I think we have to fix politics.

Manda: Okay. But we’re also going to have to fix the narrative. Particularly given that reforms just got eye watering amounts of money, and we know that they understand the Cambridge Analytica move and roots. We know that they took Brexit. I had friends who were vegans who were getting very highly targeted videos of cattle going through a slaughterhouse and the bodies hanging in in lorries being taken to Europe. And the message that if you vote for Brexit, cows will no longer be sent abroad. It was pure limbic targeting and it was wholly incorrect. And it worked. And so my understanding of neurophysiology and George Lakoff and all of the messaging things, is limbic targeting is hard and fast. You target the cortex and everybody makes their decisions in the limbic system and then layers on the post-hoc reasoning afterwards. And yes, it may be that we’ve got really good answers to the glass in the park, because we’ve taken that as a placeholder for everything else. If the online messaging is harder, faster and sinks deeper, I don’t know that the glass in the park is going to get there. And at the moment we have a legacy media of the various newspapers and the BBC that is leaning very hard towards Reform. And we have an online space that is owned by techno fascists.

Manda: What narrative are we going to craft and how are we going to disseminate it in a way that gives people… Okay, let me rephrase that. I talked to Uffe Elbaek a couple of weeks ago, and he set up the Alternative in Denmark, a beautiful political party. And they didn’t have a manifesto, they had values by which they would live, of integrity, transparency, empathy, courage, humour, compassion. I think that might be wrong, the last one. They had six and a really good messaging system. And he had talked to a bunch of people and he said that everybody wants to feel safe, a limbic thing. They need to feel heard. And that’s what the right is very good at: yes, your life is shit. They need to know why change is happening and the right combats that by going change doesn’t need to happen. We’re going to go back to the 1950s when everything was perfect and all the white people had houses and everything was grand. And you remember this, somehow. We can’t do that and change is happening anyway. So why change is happening, we need to explore. And you, the person we’re targeting, talking to, will have a role in the post-change world that will feel good to you. And so the right does yes, your life is shit, change doesn’t need to happen. We’re going to create a world where you (person who votes for us) is going to feel superior to all the other people, and that gives you a sense of meaning and purpose.

Manda: I’m really interested in the narrative that we on the left could craft, that will get home in spite of the slurry of what’s coming down the line from AI and digital tech and an increasingly hysterical legacy media. The anti Zack headlines on the mail have been hilarious. The mail really hates him. It’s a bit like when Fox lists what Mamdani is doing as if it were bad. And people are looking at it going, but this is really good. You’re filling in the potholes. You’ve got kids having free education. You’re, creating homes for people. Why is that bad? So they can shoot themselves in the foot. But am I making sense with it’s a narrative shift that we need? And I worry that our capacity to craft a narrative and get it to land has not been good in the past.

Jamie: That I would absolutely agree with. Our narrative has been very poor. And the fundamental cause of that, is what the left has done is argue against things it doesn’t like, rather than for things it does like. Arguing against something is not a plan.

Manda: No, exactly.

Jamie: Yeah. One of the things about the central route is it’s not necessarily a more complex argument. It’s about those things that really matter to people. So how much do you care whether Nigel Farage is holding a pint or a cigarette? You know, that’s just a vibe thing. I’ll tell you what you do care about, is when you go into the pub and you find out it’s £6.50 a pint. That is when you start to care about it. And then the left argument is, why is it £6.50 a pint now? It used to be £3.50 a pint whenever it was, you’d get your figures right, I haven’t memorised that. So this is the approach you have to start to take. The cheapest way to heat your home is also the fastest way to decarbonise a country. That’s true. If someone attacks you on it, they’re now attacking on the ground where we want to fight. Not there was this bloke and look at the colour of his skin, we’re not saying we’re racist, and he attacked that woman over there. Yeah. Hang on. And most of your movement have got convicted wife beaters in them. But then you’re into the old Tony Benn, wrestling with the chimney sweep. So we want to be talking about what we want to do. That requires thinking through what we want to do. That requires having somebody thought about it. Get other people who are quite clever to check it. That’s what I’ve done with Hostage Nation. It’s been read by lots of eminent economists on the left, I’m getting feedback from them. I won’t drop their names in it because that would imply an endorsement, although actually the feedback is very, very good. There’s this famous story that’s quite possibly true, that when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, she walked into the Shadow Cabinet, slapped down this copy of The Road to Serfdom on the table and said, this is what we believe.

Manda: This is what we believe. Yes.

Jamie: Now, did those people go out and start arguing for Hayek? No. What they did is they started going out saying things like ‘the trouble with socialism is you run out of other people’s money’. But they did it because they believed they had an intellectual edifice behind them that would back them up. And what the left continues to do is argue on the basis of morality, and is effective. And for all the tricks of the right wing, Reform have never got above 20 odd percent, ever. And there are a lot of people will vote to keep Reform out. Which is a first past the post challenge. But they are not actually as successful as they like to think they are. It doesn’t work that well. It’s very short term, it’s a slash and burn version of politics. It’s not a sustainable way to build a large coalition. And Trump’s finding that he’s deeply unpopular now. So what we have to do is build something where people will look at it. Now if we look at the voting segments in the British public at the moment, the Green Party, I think have a ceiling of about 20%.

Manda: Kind of like Reform then.

Jamie: And that’s a ceiling as well. You need a very good candidate, and a very good campaign to hit that ceiling. And they’re progressive voters, people who will vote first and foremost because they care about the planetary boundaries, they care about human rights and what’s happened in Gaza. They care about the rising tide of racism. The next 20% are what I call the green curious. And these are people who agree with us on all of those things, but it’s not the top of their list.

Manda: It’s not their priority. Okay.

Jamie: Top of their list is, look, I’m retiring in ten years, I want to make sure my pension is safe. Why can’t my kids afford a house? And they look at the Green Party and they I think, sorry, I haven’t heard anything from you that persuades me that you’re a safer bet than Andy Burnham. Right. That’s where Hostage Nation fits in. And then the next set is what I call the patriotic workers. These are not racists. They’ve got workmates, they’ve got friends, they play football with people of all ethnicities and that doesn’t matter. They’re not woke. They won’t use the language that you get when you turn up to a Green Party meeting and everybody announces their pronouns. But what they want is yeah, look, everything’s shit, isn’t it? Look, there’s potholes everywhere. And look, you can’t get a bus and look, my granny had to wait four hours in A&E. What they want is what are you going to fix, mate, usually. And the same plan will support all of those people. That’s 60% of the electorate. That’s a landslide.

Manda: Okay. Which is far higher than anybody’s got in the recent past.

Jamie: Ever.

Manda: Yes. Okay. So then the narrative then is the narrative that says insulating your house is going to drop your bills and is going to help us with the poly crisis. And we also have plans for the NHS and all the rest of it, basically Hostage Nation, which we’re coming to later. We have an electoral system in the UK and in other places in the world, which is first past the post, which is wide open to being gamed. A number of questions; what would you replace it with and how and how fast can we? Because all the things I’m reading are, you know, we put it in the manifesto for the next election, and then we all talk about it, and then it gets put in place for the election after it. And I don’t think we have that length of time. I genuinely think we’ll be very lucky to have more than two more elections of any sort. So what’s the fastest we could replace it? Because again, Reform will come in and do whatever they need to do regardless. And why are we still in a pillow fight while they’re going for headshots? What could we do if we actually wanted to be radical?

Manda: And maybe it is that the PLP is actually Tories with different ties and we can’t. But, given we have first past the post, so that’s one question. And the second is, at the last election I was following at least four different tactical voting websites, at least one of which I sincerely believe was funded by the hard right, because it was consistently giving different answers to all the others. How could we in the progressive movement, find a verifiable, accurate, tactical voting website so that in any constituency, people know how to support the not Reform candidate? And as a result of that, is there any way we can get past the incredibly blinkered 18th century view of the parties, where if you are the compass candidate in Surrey, you are actually expelled from all of the parties for daring to to connect across party lines and be the progressive candidate. So how do we create a progressive politics within the existing system that actually works is the base question.

Jamie: Yeah, I’ve already solved world politics.

Manda: So now we’re going to solve the next election in the UK. Yes.

Jamie: So first past the post. It’s a problem that needs to change. I wouldn’t get to believing it’s a magic bullet. Britain and Belarus are the only two countries that have a first past the post system. We’re not the only two countries that have bad governments. You’ve got to bear that in mind.

Manda: Okay. Yes. Look at Israel.

Jamie: I would start from the perspective of look, create a decent alternative. Because if you haven’t got one, a better voting system, all you’re going to get is a different combination of the bad people, or incompetent people or self-interested people, whatever.

Manda: All right. So stop there then how? Because Isabel Harding, how we get the wrong politicians. We have a very bad system of choosing who’s going to actually represent us. And it’s getting worse because the assaults on even the candidates now are horrendous. I read an article just before we came on and people are just not standing, because as soon as you put your head above the parapet, somebody is going to threaten you with actual physical violence. And I don’t know how we get around that. How would you, leaving aside the safety issues, because I don’t know how we address that. What’s the better alternative? The Green Party, a Green Party Plus, Green Party plus Majority, Green Party/Majority/Your Party, which for those outside the UK was a thing that Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana managed to get into a catfight on before it ever even actually existed. Somebody a wee while ago, and I think it was on a podcast you were on, said the Right builds alliances and the Left hunts down traitors. And we need to stop doing that. We need to be, you know, I may disagree with you on this tiny, tiny little cultural thing, but we’re facing extinction and we need not to piss about. How would you create an alternative that works?

Jamie: This is where you go back to actually what incentivises people, what works in their self-interest. Now, self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Self-interest can be cooperating and usually is. One of the biggest problems actually, that is causing the threat of planetary extinction, is the fact that we are so astonishingly good at cooperating. Some of the food that I eat today is being grown by someone on a continent I’ve never visited, will never meet. And yet somehow we’ve built this system where the money I pay for it, some of it at least, will end up in their pocket to incentivise them to grow more. So that’s the war machine. I mean, you think about what’s required to produce a fighter jet. These are technological marvels and we’ve managed to cooperate to do it. So how do we use and harness that cooperative basis for common good, as opposed to the bottom line. So earlier I was saying that one of the mistakes is to think that a political party can act as a rational being, when actually it’s this emergent property that comes from all of the people who are involved. With a corporation in a market economy, what you have is the same signal all the way through. It’s what’s the bottom line? What’s the bottom line? In every department.

Manda: Profit, profit, profit.

Jamie: Even every individual it can be measured. And so you’ve got people who never met each other, don’t know each other but they still have the same goal. And what we want is some clarity of what we’re trying to achieve. If we can do that amongst politicians, we can get there. The only way you can do that, by the way, is to have transparency and measuring systems. Now, how is it at the moment that a politician is evaluated? Well, maybe if they get on Question time, a few million people will know them. But beyond that, it’s basically, who’s arse have you kissed inside your own party to get on the candidate list? Because it used to be, for a brief period in the Labour Party, that you campaigned and the members chose.

Manda: Right. But that was dangerous,eh?

Jamie: And they wouldn’t let that happen to me, because the members would have voted for me by a landslide. And so again, even in something like the Green Party, candidates are not allowed to campaign for their roles. Or certainly it’s strongly discouraged, in a competitive selection. So that’s the sort of thing, you kno. We need feedback. People can look like I like them because everybody says, you know, oh yeah, more money for the NHS, no war. Great. Even people who are insincere can say that.

Manda: Yes, quite.

Jamie: I want you quizzed. I want a proper panel where I get people who know what they’re talking about to ask you tough questions, and I’ll find out if you crumble or if you’re any good.

Manda: Have you actually got any basis for what you’re saying or are you just parroting the latest line? So open primaries.

Jamie: Yeah. Now. All right. I mean, I’ve spent 20 odd years teaching jiu jitsu, so perhaps I’m a bit of a believer in actually teaching people to be quite good at what they’re doing before they go into combat, otherwise they get hurt. But I think that’s kind of the approach. Why don’t we have proper political training and an opportunity for people to test their ideas? Because that also creates an environment where division or differences of opinion are actually fine because they become routine.

Manda: And it seems to me we need to get the emotional literacy where having a difference of opinion with somebody doesn’t trigger someone to the point where they feel personally assaulted and become reactive. Because our entire political system at the moment seems to be based on triggering the other people. If you watch Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons and watch the faces of people who are extremely angry, particularly Reform, but but not always. I mean, it seems to be that the point is to press the buttons of the other side and then watch them detonate and then whoever can kind of maintain a little bit of cool in the middle of that, wins that debate. And this is I mean, it’s 12 year old politics, as in the politics of 12 year olds. And actually, I’ve met many 12 year olds who would rise above that. And we need a bit of emotional literacy. And it seems to me that, not all of them, I have some friends who are MPs; hello out there, I know you are emotionally illiterate people. But we also have a lot of people for whom self-regulation is not a concept. How do we help find the people who are intellectually competent and emotionally competent?

Jamie: Yeah. I mean, it’s all about feedback mechanisms. Everything is. Nature is nothing but feedback mechanisms. Everyone remembers the experiment they did at school where they grew a sunflower and put it in a cupboard and it grew towards the light. We all do that and we must not pretend otherwise.

Manda: Okay, so tighten the feedback loops.

Jamie: So the feedback loops are: at the moment the feedback from Prime Minister’s questions is who says the thing that the news will report on? Because you’re not going to persuade anyone to cross the floor in Parliament on the basis of that. It’s about persuading the electorate. What’s the thing that the Daily Mail will pick up? What’s the thing Navarro will pick up? What’s the thing in the middle that BBC will pick up? And that’s why you get them doing this. And you’ve got people who are paid, whose job it is to write the lines that will get them there. Now ignore it. That’s all the peripheral route. Let’s get people talking about how can you persuade someone, and this should be your test; if you want to run for your local council, you persuade someone that you know how to get their bins emptied on time or get their park clean.

Manda: Or fill in the potholes like Mamdani. It was genius.

Jamie: Yeah. You want to run for Parliament and you want to be our candidate, don’t tell us a great speech about your hardships in life, because we may well have sympathy with that but it does not mean that you can actually run the Treasury. What we want to know is you tell us how you will bring down energy bills. We start to do that, we’ve shifted it. Because it’s one of these things that once it kicks in, everything else becomes obsolete. It is a system change.

Manda: Okay. Last week, we had a 15 year old girl who is astonishing and is doing amazing things. And one of the things she stood up and said, you’re all talking language I don’t understand. And Nigel Farage is saying, stop the boats. And guess who I’m going to listen to? Even though it’s not her thing, because it’s easy and I know what it means. I guess, this is how we reduce NHS waiting times, this is how we heat your house; do you think that will cut through when up against a three word like Make America Great Again, a slogan that feeds people’s desperate need for relevance, perhaps? Do you think it’s going to cut through?

Jamie: Yes.

Manda: Okay. You’ve been there. You’ve campaigned. So I absolutely believe if you say it does. Yeah. Okay.

Jamie: And got the second highest vote an independent’s ever got in this country.

Manda: Cool. All right. And I’ve never, no, that’s not true. I stood for the council once, but never again.

Jamie: So, a really great three word slogan is tax the rich.

Manda: Yes. Isn’t it? Well done gary Stevenson.

Jamie: What ‘Tax the rich’ has in common with ‘stop the boats’ with ‘take back control’ is they are all intentional slogans.

Manda: Yes. They do something. Not we’re against something.

Jamie: Intentionality against another conscious being. That’s deep within human psychology as well. We evolved not to think, oh, look, there’s a mudslide coming down and the trajectory of that is such that if I slip in it and I might drown. No, no, that’s too slow.

Manda: Run for your life!

Jamie: What you think is. Ah! It’s coming for me. You’ve given it an intent when actually it’s just a natural force. It’s just physics.

Manda: Oh I see, okay.

Jamie: But ‘stop the boats!’; ‘them boats, right. They’re the ones, right!’ And it’s getting on that immediate threat of another intentional actor. Tax the rich. Is it the rich? No. The rich are actually largely rich because they started with a load of money and the system works for them. And a lot of them are not particularly nasty, they’re just self-interested. But tax the rich frames it as ‘no, no, the system is now a person that’s trying to get you’. That’s why you’ve got no money. That’s why you you’re looking in your your trolley and you’re thinking I can’t afford a birthday cake for my kids. That’s when it hits you. So yes, we need the arguments. We need the intellectual edifice behind it. But you also need the assets that work in the very narrow window. So it’s a multi scope campaign. I reckon if we do that we’ll win.

Manda: Okay. And just on on that, just for curiosity. So Gary Stephenson’s was actually ‘tax wealth not work’ which doesn’t do exactly what you just said. It does a bit. I mean it starts off with tax the rich but is that too complex? Is it not creating the kind of landslide I know what I’m up against, then?

Jamie: Well there’s no one size fits all. AOC wore the famous dress that said tax the rich. You know, we’re allowed more than one string to our bow.

Manda: All right. Okay. Yes, that’s probably a bit too geeky. And we’re going to stop very soon, Jamie, I promise you, because I think we’re both getting quite intellectually knackered. But if we were going to replace first past the post, and assuming that my preferred version of quadratic voting on the blockchain is probably too complex for people, what version of a different way of electing, provided we got the right candidates. Let’s give that as a given, at least within a progressive realm. What system of election would you prefer and how soon could we make it happen?

Jamie: Yeah, if we tackle that second question. We were in Leeds, at a transport for the North meeting, Andy says to me, I’ve been thinking about proportional representation. What do you think? And we had a chat, and I was saying I was in favour and he says, yeah, I think I’ll come out in favour of it. And this is some years ago. The reality is if we look back to the 2010 coalition government, that it was in the manifesto, obviously of the Liberal Democrats. So the coalition agreement gave them kind of the cover, which meant that the Parliament Act, and for those who don’t understand this, you’ve got the House of Commons, you’ve got the House of Lords. The Commons has primacy, but the Lords can block something for up to a year if it wasn’t in a manifesto. Because it was in a manifesto, they couldn’t block it, as part of that coalition agreement which says we’re going to have one. But they started that pretty much immediately. You’ve then got to get the legislation through. Legislation you have to consult on, otherwise you’re going to get what’s called a judicial review, which can push it back easily another year. You then have to get the electoral commission to do consultations and set all the boundaries Et cetera. Et cetera.

Manda: Okay. It’s a logistically slow thing.

Jamie: Yeah. That’s the wheels of state grinding. There’s good reasons why we want them to grind slowly, because otherwise people get caught and hurt. So this is one of the cases where perhaps there’s a downside to that, not being able to move quickly. So what you would need is for it to be in the manifestos for the next general election. But if the next general election is won with a hung parliament, the one after that might be six months, not five years. That’s why I’m thinking, you know, we need 100 good green MPs in there.

Manda: Right. Okay. And have you got a preferred system, one that you think would work better than the others? I mean, the one that we voted on wasn’t even proper PR, when we actually had a vote back in 2010. An alternative vote isn’t really a PR system. Have you got one that isn’t going to just elect a bunch of party apparatchiks that the parties get to define?

Jamie: No, I don’t. But I think it opens the question of what do you want your MPs to do? And this concept of a good constituency MP creates a ground where people can essentially absolve themselves of any questions to do with planetary survival, to do with economics, to do with human rights, by saying, no, no, I’m here for my constituents. Well, actually you’re not. You’re here to steer the direction of the country and to make laws. And I think there’s probably a case for having constituency MPs roles separated out from lawmakers roles. You start to look at that. And then a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff, I think should be devolved a lot more. You know, why on earth someone in Westminster decides which bus routes to fund in the North East, makes no sense to me.

Manda: Right. Oh, I feel a third podcast coming on about the whole other different governance system. Okay, let’s leave that for the moment. Just briefly on tactical voting. This is a UK only, but I’m guessing tactical voting occurs around the around the world. It seems to me that very urgently we need some kind of agreement on tactical voting in the UK, so that whenever the next election is called, we know how to elect the not Reform person. Because otherwise, however many what was it that Compass calls them? Tragic constituencies. Where the right came through the middle because the left was split. Even if we we all agree that labour is not really left, but it’s more left than Reform, slightly. Have you any concept of how that might happen?

Jamie: Well, that’s very difficult. For the reasons you’ve outlined. Is how do you trust the information? How do you identify who’s left and who isn’t? Last general election Luke Akehurst one of the labour right, was parachuted in to Durham North West and there were people from that constituency asking me, Jamie, run against him, please. They were never going to vote for him to keep Reform out.

Manda: Okay. Okay. So the take home from this is that our political system is wholly broken at a point when we are heading over the edge of the cliff of the sixth mass extinction, and we need total systemic change. Which, as we are rounding up, is the point of this podcast. All right. I think we should stop there because I think there are so many avenues we could go, but I think we’ve got a pretty good idea that change is possible. We are going to talk about Hostage Nation in more detail in another podcast, because I think it’s brilliant and it doesn’t require total systemic change. It’s all doable within the envelope of what we have now. Andy Burnham could instigate it tomorrow and it would work. So we’re going to come to that later. Is there anything else that you would like to say as we bring this to a close?

Jamie: I think one of the things is what do I do when I get up tomorrow morning? Is the question that people always ask. There are so many causes. There are so many aspects of the poly crisis. My advice is always build something positive rather than go down a negative route of oppose something. Unless there’s an alternative, history will provide the moment, but we need an alternative that’s ready. That’s what we’ve got to build.

Manda: Right. Right. That’s back to Milton Friedman: when there’s a crisis, people will pick up the ideas that are already around. So they have to be around. And you are providing a whole suite of ideas. I am so in awe of the amount of stuff you put out. And the intellectual basis behind it and that’s what we need. So for now, Jamie Driscoll, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I look forward to the next time.

Jamie: Thanks, Manda.

Manda: Okay, people. So as ever, when we stopped recording, we continued the conversation. And often the most lively and vibrant part of the conversation happens when the cameras are not rolling, so to speak. And Jamie and I both realised that we had said we were going to talk about political polyamory or speed dating or whatever it was we called it, and we hadn’t, and we wanted to. So here’s the little tiny segment. I just switched the recording back on again because it seemed interesting, and I thought you’d like to hear it. Here we go:

Jamie: So when we’re talking about did the Labour Party have a plan? I remember, as part of the National Policy Forum process, this will be February 2023, I went down to labour headquarters along with the other mayors, sitting there next to Andy next to Steve Burnham. And we did this sort of speed dating with the shadow cabinet. So Yvette comes in and she tells us what she’s doing for five minutes. We ask a question, say what we want, what we would be doing. And then it’s Ed Miliband and then it’s Johnny Reynolds. And that’s the way that we’re doing it. And what struck me was **** me, these people have no idea, there were no plans. I mean, it was shocking. At the end of the day, it was all finished and I was talking to the two policy guys, the director of policy and his main policy worker. And he said, oh, you’ve really helped us today. And I was thinking, why does it take a provincial mayor from the northeast to start talking about how British pension funds should work? You know, I should be talking about buses and council houses, not rewiring the financial system. So it was quite apparent they had no plan for how to do anything.

Jamie: And that’s exactly what happened. You know, they come in, the first thing they do is, oh, I’ll tell you what, we’ll remove the winter fuel allowance. I mean, what was that supposed to achieve? And then even Andy’s come in and I’ll speak up in defence of Andy, he was one of the very few people in the Labour Party in any position who spoke out in my defence when they blocked me. So this isn’t coming from any kind of place of nastiness towards Andy. But when you have had heat wave after heat wave in the summer and you come out with, oh, well, you know, don’t buy disposable barbecues. That’s not a plan is it?

Manda: I know, I know. And it’s not even a grasp of the fundamentals. It’s like there’s some weird disjoint. We know that the climate at this moment is the most stable it’s going to be in our lifetimes. I was talking to someone last week who’s writing a book published next spring on the collapse of the the AMOK. And it was a very scary conversation, to be honest. And they must know this. He’s the Prime minister. He must be getting the reports. He must have seen the unredacted national security implications of the Climate emergency report. What’s happening?

Jamie: It’s very difficult if you don’t have a systems thinking mindset, be that engineer, scientist, whatever, economist, even. And I know what it’s like, you get bombarded with things every 15 minutes. Oh, and Prime Minister, you’ve got to go and do a photo shoot in Sainsbury’s. And then apparently he’s furious about that because it comes out that he’s taken £164,000 from Lord Sainsbury. But why didn’t he know that? He’s a clever enough bloke.

Manda: Yeah. And maybe don’t take £164,000. I mean, okay, so this is a separate question that we won’t going into, but we are recording this the Monday after Reform has just got enormous amounts of money from the Thai based crypto billionaires. That’s not slightly shady at all. What can we do about that? I mean, he’s already bottled once, having some kind of cap on political donations. Why don’t we just stop all political donations. All parties are funded by the state once they’ve got over a certain threshold.

Jamie: Yeah, I would say that if you want to donate £100, you can donate £100. And that’s within not everybody’s means, there’s a lot of people struggle in this country. But most people, if they really care, can donate £100 to something. That’s fine. No problem. £100,000 no, because that’s out of the reach of everyone and that’s buying democracy. So that’s the easiest way to do it. And why you would allow any overseas donations at all, I really don’t understand. That strikes me as against the interests of a sovereign nation. But what we’ve got to bear in mind is, well, what’s the counter to this? Yes. You know, we make you PM tomorrow Manda then you can implement that, but you’re not and you’re not going to be. Neither am I.

Manda: You have slightly more chance, Jamie, because you might stand. But anyway. Yes. No, it’s not going to happen. Yeah.

Jamie: So what do we do? Well, the answer to this is actually to organise effectively. And that requires clear plans of what we’re going to do. And when you go out and you say things like, ‘only we can win here against Reform!’ You know, be it the Greens, be it the Labour Party or whatever. That’s not a plan. And so naturally enough, people think, oh, whatever.

Manda: Well, they think you would say that wouldn’t you? Because that’s what they do. And it’s plainly untrue. So what you say is instead, here’s our plan to have British money go into British jobs.

Jamie: Yeah. We’re going to change the way the tax system rewards savings, and we’re going to make sure that money goes into creating retrofit. And so your kids will have a job. And then people think, actually that sounds quite sensible. You’re not weird radical, you know, you don’t want to make everyone a vegan. You just want us to have nice, warm homes. I quite like that. That’s what we need to be doing. Because one of the things that they are trying to defy gravity with is to use that 72 billion and everything else they’ve got, is to try and persuade us that the Emperor has clothes on. And all we say is, look, the Emperor’s got no clothes; this is what you need to do.

Manda: Right. Yes. And it doesn’t matter what the Emperor is or is not wearing. Here’s a better plan, that is back to Buckminster Fuller and the way to defeat the system is not to assault the system, it’s to build a better system that makes the old system obsolete. And that’s what you’ve done with Hostage Nation and the Majority and everything else, is build systems that make cognitive and emotional sense. Brilliant. Okay, we’ll stop for the third time. Thank you Jamie.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for this part of this conversation. We’re going to move into the second part quite swiftly. So just to say an enormous thanks to Jamie. I am totally aware of how busy he is and I am incredibly grateful for his time, his thoughtfulness, his generosity of spirit, his integrity, and the depth of his thinking. There are links in the show notes to Jamie’s website, to the Majority website and to the Hostage Nation paper. We’re going to be talking about that a little bit more in what follows.

Manda: So for now, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and for this week’s somewhat complicated production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for looking after the farm while I was away at the gathering last week. It was chaos. I am incredibly grateful also for the video production of what is still a somewhat complicated podcast, and for organising the YouTube channel. Thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcripts. I hope they are fairly straightforward. To Faith Tilleray for also holding the fort while I was away at a time when all havoc broke out, I could not have picked a worse time to be away. Except we planned this about this time last year and we did not plan for the havoc. So thank you for that and for a series of incredibly interesting conversations about choice and agency and what it is to be part of the endless cycle of inter becoming. It’s so good to be able to talk about those things when I’ve spent nearly a week in the company of Brother Spirit and a whole bunch of other deeply thoughtful people, and need to process the ideas that are swirling around in the kaleidoscope of my mind. So thank you. And finally, from here, a huge thanks to you for listening. I hope this engages the fire inside you. We do need to make change. And this is how we make change to the existing system, so that it can lead us to the systemic change that we need and want. So off you go, find the links and we’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you and goodbye.

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