Latest / Thinking Class / #083 - Ed Davies - Britain's Crises: Lost Boys, Broken Families & A Nation Out Of Work

Transcript

#083 - Ed Davies - Britain's Crises: Lost Boys, Broken Families & A Nation Out Of Work · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Edward Davies.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Ed is policy director of the Centre of Social Justice, a veteran of health policy.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: He has a storied career as a journalist, editor, and policy wonk, and has also worked for several UK government cabinet ministers during the course of his career.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ed's work has focused on the role of relationships in making us truly happy and healthy.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: In this conversation, Ed and I think out loud about the issues surrounding family dynamics and breakdown in the United Kingdom, the alarming statistics regarding family structures, the rise of fatherless households, and the decline of marriage.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: What cultural shifts have influenced family formation or the increasing lack thereof, why family formation and well-being should be prioritized over GDP, the concerning state of boys and young men in society and why it is that they are struggling, the impact of technology on relationships, the need for male-only spaces to nurture boys and men's masculinity, the reasons behind and the challenges of worklessness in the United Kingdom, the role of romantic relationships in employment, the need for reform in the criminal justice system, the reasons behind the housing crisis in the United Kingdom, and much, much more.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Ed is a wonderful guest.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: I dearly enjoyed talking to him.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: He knows his subject matter deeply.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's motivated by the practical over the theoretical, and he is definitely one of life's good guys.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice, and Substack, where paid subscribers get the opportunity to contribute questions to special Q ⁇ A's to my guests that only they will get access to.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go Thinking Class together.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me very much.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Ed, you are a research director at the Center for Social Justice, and today we're going to talk about some of the dysfunction that we see within British society today, cutting across family and work, people's well-being, and much more besides.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps before we get into some of those topics, you can tell us how it is you became a research director at the Centre for Social Justice because I I believe you were a journalist once.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was, yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was a sort of slightly wayward journey through journalism.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually very first, I was on a graduate training scheme in the pharmaceutical industry.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this was in the early noughties, and I spent all my time looking at the fledgling news sites rather than doing work because the internet was novelty.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then I thought, why don't I just retrain and become a journalist?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I was a journalist for about 15 years.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I specialized in health and politics.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I was an editor at the British Medical Journal for seven years and various other bits and bobs.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2015-ish, I was working out in America as a US editor and had a moment of looking around for jobs and thinking, um, I don't really want to do this anymore.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking, I'm a bit like an ex-smoker, looking at journalism and thinking I don't love these jobs.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and now I'm pretty brutal about journalism as a result, but decided to try and do something.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I thought I'd been reporting about politics, let's do some politics.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I'd heard of the CSJ, and I wrote to them and said got any jobs and a wayward journey.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But six months later, there I was, and I've been there now since 2016.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I had two years off for good behaviour where I was a government advisor uh working in the Department of Health as a policy advisor, but largely had been in and around CSJ now for almost 10 years.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And what was it that um pushed you into what has become your specialism?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I know you focus very closely on family and family breakdown in the United Kingdom.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I also know you're your dad to a couple of boys.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is was there anything about your uh personal life that led you to focus on family as as a as a topic of pressing concern for the country, or is it happenstance that you ended up there?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's interesting.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So when I joined the CSJ, the reason I I thought it was an interesting place to go to is in health, people talk a lot about the social determinants of health.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they get a lot of lit service, but you're talking about employment, education, things like that.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt that the CSJ did them really properly, which is why I went looking for the CSJ.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I knew it did family stuff.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, you know, I had a family, I had kids, I was reasonably passionate about family.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the longer you spend working in poverty and deprivation, if you look for it, you see family breakdown everywhere.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter whether you're working in on employment or education or addiction or homelessness, you will find if you look for it that there is family breakdown underpinning an awful lot of what we see as poverty in the UK.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I suppose over the last 10 years, it's become more of a specialism, firstly, because I think the stats show it is, but secondly, because it frustrates me that people don't talk about it.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those difficult, sensitive things, it's a bit taboo.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I feel like if we're not talking about it, then no one else will.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think if we are going to make meaningful change in this area, we have to talk about family life in the UK.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's talk about the scale of the problem.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned statistics.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: What is the current picture of family life in the United Kingdom?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I think probably the most instructive to get a feel for what's happened over the last few generations.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I was born in the 1970s.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were a teenager in the mid-1970s, nine out of ten 16-year-olds sitting their O levels in the mid-70s would have lived with both their parents.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it was quite rare not to live with both your parents age 16, just 50 years ago.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Today, it's about 50-50.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so in the space of not very long, really, you know, generation, two generations, we have gone from it being pretty unusual to not live with your both your parents to absolutely normal.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that 50-50 is a national average as well.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: You go into poorer communities, and often I think the the bottom 20%, so the bottom quintile of income, it's less than one in five now live with married parents.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so when you go into certain pockets of deprivation, you see almost complete fatherhood deserts, really, in some of our estates around the UK.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a pretty bleak picture in some areas, and it's happened incredibly quickly.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think people realise quite how quickly uh and severely it's happened.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think often the the sort of rethinking class, the chattering classes, uh are slightly protected from this because it falls very unequally as well.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So marriage rates in the top quintile uh are about 85%.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: About 85% of children live with married parents, and another, I think it's about another 9% with cohabiting parents.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you're almost certainly going to have a fairly stable home.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: But it's as you get lower down into deeper deprivation, you see that family structure disintegrates almost completely in some areas.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And because we aren't always seeing that first hand, we forget how serious it can be, I think.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned a few things with pulling on upon those threads in that response.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: One, fatherless deserts, and then secondly, family breakdown and the disintegration of it happening so quickly.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take those in turn turn, um, because I suppose they're they're probably very interlinked.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Why is it, or uh have you found why it is that there are fatherless deserts?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: What's driving the lack of fathers in these areas?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you think it is culturally that has led to such a rapid breakdown in family life?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so they are they are very closely interlinked.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes we're more comfortable talking about um fathers than we are about family breakdown and particularly about marriage.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but at the core of what's gone on is this um decline of family formation.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, when we talk about family breakdown, the formal divorce has been coming down for about 20 years now in the UK.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is that families aren't forming in the first place.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, people aren't getting together, they're not getting married, they're not entering civil partnerships, they don't have that stability.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that matters because actually the act of commitment quadruples your chances of being committed.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the average cohabitation lasts about three years, the average marriage lasts 12 years.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it does matter that you make this formal commitment if you want stability for you and your child, and that's not happening.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2022, um, I think that was the first year ever where the majority of adults in the UK were not married or in a civil partnership, and the majority of children were not born into a marriage or civil partnership.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's quite a tipping point we experienced.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and as to the question of why, I mean, it's it's complex.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's no one thing, but there are a few things I point towards.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the overarching culture, which comes really after the Second World War, of individualism.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you have this huge communal effort.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: People forget that we actually had rationing for 10 years after the Second World War.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: We had this very communitarian feel, very communal effort, and that pendulum swung towards individualism.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um within that, there are probably a couple of key things I would flag that happened.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: That happened for really good reasons, I think.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: So one of them would be female employment was a good thing, is a good thing.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what you saw was in the Second World War, a lot of women went out to work by necessity.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a slight false thing that women didn't work and now they do.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, a lot of working class women did work.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The employment was 50%-ish, I think.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it moved really, really a lot higher, sort of moved from 50 to 70 percent.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the women found they enjoyed work and they liked having the economic freedom to live the life the way they wanted to.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you saw after the Second World War was a series of um laws passed, which essentially made sure that women got the same pay, the same rights, and everything else.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think everyone would agree this is a good thing.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: But then with that economic freedom comes the lower necessity that you don't need to depend on on someone else's income.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that was probably one step.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The other one that's talked about quite a lot is the introduction of the contraceptive pill, um, and how actually you were able to decouple sex from relationships in a way.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's a really interesting one.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say, one of the most interesting things about it is the technology existed for the pill quite some time before um the pill was actually launched as a as a potential contraceptive.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there is a sort of confluence of culture as well as um the actual ability to have a drug that does this.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's not entirely straightforward that one equaled the other.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: There is that culture that came with it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a couple I'd flag, but possibly while talking about culture, one of the really big things has happened, I think, probably in the last 25 years, is that the way we view marriage has shifted now as not something that you do to build your life around, but the thing you do after you've built your life.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you hear it referred to as this it's now a capstone rather than a cornerstone.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at the age people get married, going back only a generation or so, it probably would have been early 20s, and you'd have started out on life by getting married, and then you'd have bought your home and you'd have grown your family, and you'd have your career would have grown and you'd have negotiated that in partnership.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what you hear from young people is actually, I want to be able to build my career, buy my home, get myself settled, and then I will think about getting married, having a family.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: What that has actually done is it's delayed marriage a long time, it's delayed fertility as well.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you're seeing very low fertility rates.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: People tend not to have children or many children until they are in a stable relationship.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you've seen all these knock-on effects of that.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're into a cycle of well, we're not married because we don't value marriage, because we don't get married, because we don't value marriage.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what we're seeing now with a number of consequences.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I wonder if I mean, obviously, you can't pass cultural from economic reasons when it comes down to it, because the way we think about economics is informed by culture and and vice versa.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we flip over to the economic side of things that might be leading to family breakdown.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I will I'll I'll I'll maybe do a bit of a monologue hypothesis for you, and you can tell me whether you you you you're into it or not.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we are extraordinarily focused on GDP within our political conversations.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: That effectively seems to be the highest value uh that we place um upon life in our political discourse.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: So everything's about growth, everything is about um making sure that everyone's in work.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we talk about increasing the tax base, all these things.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, our policies end up being informed by that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we have governments that find ways in which we can get both parents out of the home at work, and so they'll talk about well, if we're going to provide some support to the family, it's so we can get kids in nursery from as early as you like, really, which I know David Goodhart in his book, The Care Dilemma, has shown is not good, not particularly helpful to uh a child's development.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got GDP is the the value that we're we're shooting towards, and that filters through a lot of things, whether it's our education, which is all about what how do we make you useful for the economic marketplace, which there's nothing inherently bad in that, but it's the the key, the key value.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Philip Pilkington has just written a book called The The Collapse of Global Liberalism, which has just come out, and effectively he's saying now we're seeing liberal society, and we won't go down that um that rabbit hole in this conversation, starts to fray at the seams, and people are now moving toward pre-liberal answers, things that were around a lot longer, is he's saying if we're moving into a post-liberal world, instead of having GDP as the ultimate value, we need to have family as the ultimate value.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: We need to and and given that we push through every educational setting and every media setting, the notion of economic uh growth, if you flip that round and all of a sudden you had all of the parts of the machine pushing towards the virtues of a family, uh instead of seeing them as a burden to economic growth and individual freedom, then maybe you could quickly turn this thing around.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, who knows about the time frame?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: But what do you make of any of that?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that sounds like a book I should be reading.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I think that's really interesting, and I think it's true.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, we published a paper quite recently at the CSJ looking at I mean, we use the word well-being.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really like the word, but it you get what I mean for well-being versus GDP, what makes for a flourishing society?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you're absolutely right, GDP has become this all-encompassing goal of everything.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, with that, I think the way we are viewed, the way government interacts with the population is that we are individual units of economic productivity and the government's goal is to squeeze as much as they can out of us.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this just it perpetuates through every policy.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, actually, when I was working in the Department of Health, we looked a bit at how can you help families care for older relatives?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: What are the policies you can put in place?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when we got as far as the Treasury, they said some of these might be quite interesting, but some of them do risk, particularly women in their 50s and 60s, dropping out of the labor force to care for their family.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so we won't consider it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, well, what if they want to?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or what if that's good for their family?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, if if it reduces economic activity, then we won't consider it.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it it feeds through everything.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, childcare, you mentioned, is the absolutely classic example where we now have, I mean, right across the Western world, we have this arms race for childcare.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And our current offer is going to be 30 hours a week from nine months old.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Every poll I've ever seen says that parents of young children do not want to put their children in institutional childcare from the age of nine months.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and all the research I've seen says it's probably bad for them as well.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yet somehow we have ended up in this position whereby everything is trying to feed this economic goal and everything else can go hang, really.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the the kicker in all this is that we haven't really seen meaningful growth in the UK in decades.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So people say, oh yeah, since the economic crash in 2008, we've not seen meaningful growth.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, if you look, if it hadn't been for the some of the economic practices that led to the crash, it was certainly starting to tail off before then.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: But even before that, a lot of what we do was just monetized domestic labour.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: We said to the women, right, we're going to get you in the workforce and we're going to then have nannies and we're going to have childcare and we're going to have cleaners.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so we weren't really growing at all.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: We were just turning everything financial that was once sort of taken as just done.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the the the sort of the consequence of all this folks on GDP is it's not achieving what it's meant to achieve anyway.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so going back to this question of well-being and human flourishing, you do need to be asking the questions, what gives humans a long, happy, healthy life?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what are the fundamentals of existence?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at the data, as you say, family comes up top every time.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: David Cameron famously did his um his happiness measurements, his happiness index, and got people to self-report how they were feeling about their lives.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the top answer was always um physical and mental health, and sort of sad's the reason because you're almost asking how is your physical and mental health?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that came out top.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the second best indicator was marital status.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Income was about eight.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was way down income.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, being married, having those secure relationships in in your life was fundamentally important to how you feel about it being satisfying and worthwhile and having a future.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, as you say, it's not the focus at all.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's no part of it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if actually government turned it on its head and said, okay, how do we make flourishing human beings?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then hopefully productivity will come, I think we will probably see those figures get better.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: But as it is, we are just trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of people who are fundamentally not happy anymore.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it probably won't work.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's talk a little bit about unhappiness and unhappiness amongst the people that make up these families, whether they're the heads of the families or or the children within the families.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we were speaking about men and boys before we started to record.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps this is a good opportunity to talk a little bit about the state of men and uh young boys in the country.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you've been working on a project with CSJ called the Lost Boys Project, which you have found to be uh very popular amongst those that you've gone out across the public sector and private sector.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's despite you thinking, well, people want to hear about this because masculinity has such a bad rap.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that project, but what it is that you're actually seeing amongst the boys of the United Kingdom, but why it's cause for concern.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the the sort of genesis of this came from our work with schools, actually.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: We would we spend a lot of time with um small frontline charities, schools, youth clubs, uh police, sort of trying to get under the under the skin of what's really going on out in the country.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the CSJ is quite unused like that.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Although we're a think tank in an ivory tower.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: We have 800 small organizations we work with who feed into all our policy work.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we have managers in Northwest, Northeast, Yorkshire who will help find the best organizations and help us to understand.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and as we were going around the UK, we kept going to people in schools and youth clubs in particular who said there is something going on with our boys at the moment.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was often a feeling more than anything else.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was a sort of, I can't put my finger on what it is, but I feel they are dropping out, that they are not happy, that there is something going on.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we set out to do was try and quantify that feeling, basically.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we we went into all the statistics to try and see what is it that people are feeling at the moment.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the Lost Boys Report, which came out a few months ago, is is really 70 pages of statistics, really.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's quite a depressing, dry read.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but what we found was really quite startling.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for me, I'm in my mid-40s, and I think back to when I was at school, and actually, generally, it was pretty good for boys.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, in the space of not that long, in the grand scheme of things, it's got really bad.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, to sort of give you a quick run through of some of the key things, uh going to school.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, at the moment, one of the government's key targets is to have 75% of children school ready.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at the male-female breakdown, 75% of girls are already school ready.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: They've hit that target.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: But in boys, it's only 60%.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, right from day one at school, boys are starting behind.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then as they go through school, they will do worse in their SATs, they'll do worse in GCSEs, A levels, T levels, everyone's saying, Oh, you know, they're probably if you do a vocational skills thing, they'll do better.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, they don't do anywhere near as well as the girls.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they are less likely to go to university, they are less likely to get a good degree at university, they are then more likely to be unemployed or not in education, employment, or training.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So at every stage, we have a generation now up to the age of sort of their mid-20s where they are behind girls.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think we then looked at some of the various other external factors around crime, around the internet, pornography and tech, all the various factors in boys' lives that might be contributing to this.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it really makes for quite a bleak picture, I'm afraid.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when, as you say, when we went out with this, we were a little bit nervous.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a popular thing to talk about.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: We spent 50 years fighting for equality and women's rights, and quite rightly so.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, what we are now hearing on the ground is that that that is no longer the issue, really.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: That generally speaking, that is tending to go a lot better than it did.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not perfect, there's still work to do.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: But particularly looking at that that school age, that sort of 11 to 24 year old, maybe, that there's something going on with men and it's not great.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was part one of the report.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: When we're sort of corraling around part two and looking more at solutions now, we're going to be looking right from the very early years, sort of 0 to 5, through to primary school, uh, into the workplace.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: What are the things we can be putting putting in place uh for young men to try and turn that round?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't want to spoil your report, but uh maybe you could tell us a few of the solutions, uh maybe one per age range.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think we could do to get the ship back on course?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I was to boil it down into um something fairly simple.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, that the question is how are we raising or even fathering metaphorically and literally our boys?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you have these sort of circles of influence around boys and young men that raise them and that they will both be taught by but also see how they behave.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in each of those circles, we're seeing there's there's just a real lack.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you start at the very core, that family thing, we've talked a bit about family already.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, for half the boys in the country, they don't have their father at home by the time they're 16.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they're they're sort of navigating through adolescence without a model for what masculinity or being a man looks like.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not to say that every father was perfect in in years gone by, but the father only 50 years ago was probably there.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you're starting from that that that really important deficit.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go into the next day and you think, right, well, who's in my community?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: What are those sports clubs or those teachers or those other men that might be in my life who can mentor me and sort of show me what masculinity might look like?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: And again, what we're seeing uh in schools, very few male teachers now, so but only about one in three in secondary school, uh and a quarter of primary schools have no male teachers at all anymore.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very possible now that you grow up as a boy in the UK with no father at home, no male teachers at school, uh, not much engagement in sport anymore, that sort of thing.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so you could easily reach the age of 13 without ever really having had uh a man in your life now.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you have those sort of those growing sort of circles of influence.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the top level, what you have is these sort of role model type things.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Andrew Tate has become the bogeyman of the national role model.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but what he's done is he's spoken to some of these boys who don't have close role models to them, and so they're looking around.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when you listen to the likes of Andrew Tate, it's funny.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've I talked to I've got two teenage boys.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: If I say Andrew Tate, they're like he's years ago now.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I he's a joke, he's not a serious person anymore.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: He is no one takes him seriously.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I think in the public conversation, people understand the type.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: If I say Andrew Tate, when you listen to people like that, about 80% of what they say is pretty good advice.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of, you know, it's that really basic get up, get out of bed, stop watching pornography, go and get a job, work hard.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: It then comes with 20% of really unpleasant stuff at the top, which you absolutely don't want.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: But if nobody is speaking that first 80% into these boys' lives, it's no wonder they're attracted to it.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we used to have exactly this, I mean, thinking back to I mean, go go back 20 years, sort of pre-internet, pre-that that problem, you had exactly the same problem with gangs.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Our first um ever gangs paper at the CSJ was called Dying to Belong.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the same thing.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was these boys who were looking for male role models and they weren't finding them at home or in their schools.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: That the guy they dig see, sort of on the estate or wherever it was, who had a car and seemed to be doing stuff and had a girlfriend and all the rest.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were like, Well, I want to latch onto him.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that was often someone in a gang, someone who was making some money from from dealing or whatever it might be.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very similar thing.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so, on that outer level, we get quite fixated on the well, if we just shut down the manosphere or the internet or whatever it might be, we get rid of Anna Taylor, we'll solve this.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: But what you're seeing is that's the sort of last resort of people who don't have male roles in their community and don't have a father at home and all these different things.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in terms of solutions, coming back to what it looks like, it looks like putting men in the lives of young boys in each of these different spheres to raise them to understand what a good model of masculinity looks like.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and hopefully we'll we'll sort of get onto the detail of that in the coming months, but as a starting point, that's probably where we're gonna go.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you can find pockets of the internet amongst those who are influencers in their own way, starting to raise points like this, which is uh, for example, uh with some of these rulings on um trans men and uh sorry, trans women, and effectively saying no, we should have sex as spaces for uh per-biological sex, effectively.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then lots of um people in the women's movement have said, Well, we've uh we've now started to protect women's spaces.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: You'll find influencers popping up saying, Okay, great, now we need men's spaces because they've all been crowded out by women and men need to learn from each other, all those points you were just making.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it'll be interesting if we see the conversation start to turn in that direction.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: But as an addition to that, you also notice that there's a a lot of influencers, whether they're talking about the cultivation of intellectual capacities or your physical uh capabilities, is it's about it's about agency.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so um I think people often say that working out is a is a gate is a gateway to right-leaning politics because it's very agentic and you can you get your testosterone flowing and you feel like you're capable of things and all that kind of stuff.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those who are about intellectual cultivation, they're going heavy on history and giving people a sense of place and home in the places that they live and are from.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's probably fair to say that, and I know having grown up, I was born in the 80s and grew up just as games consoles were starting to come out.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: I had a pretty balanced life of being out kicking balls around and having play fights outside and then just sitting on football manager for hours.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think it is fair to say that technology and all of the the kind of gateway of just um uh just an acid on concentration that that opens up.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, the only way you've got boys exercising any agency and feeling any sense of um achievement is through video games, yeah.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and spending the spending all of their time just thinking, oh well, I'm doing really great on Fortnite or or whatever, or they're just stuck down pornography holes, which then gives them no sense of respect for the opposite sex and totally ridiculous um uh um expectations about uh sexual relations with women.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so it feels like tech is is really at the core of quite a lot of these things.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: You see lots of men totally checked out and just aimlessly through their phone and lost online.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I want I wonder if we will now we're starting to talk about smartphones and getting them away from less than 16-year-olds.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Whether we're we're going to start talking a little bit more about do we need to take more of an Amish approach to new technology and go, what's this gonna do?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Is this gonna throw acid over and corrode our society and our individual selves um rather than just allowing it out in the open?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: I do think, I mean, so I've been on a bit of a journey with tech over the last year during this um piece of research, in that I think at the beginning I was a bit more live and let live, like the genie's out of the bottle, you can't do anything about it now.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think as I've gone through it, and there are so many things that we have seen where basically the bad just outweighs the good.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, why I don't understand why why do adults need to see beheading videos?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is stuff we can really easily stop.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Why, you know, I I keep hearing a I had several friends take their own life sort of shortly after the um pandemic was over.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the time when you see these, you see people go on and and go online and look at suicide ideation, things like that.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I why do we can stop this now?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: We actually can, and yet we don't seem to.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think anyone needs that freedom.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: There are plenty of things that we restrict in our lives.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't know in the UK, we don't allow people to have weapons, we put drugs on prescription.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: We can put restrictions quite reasonably on things that are very harmful.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think I've probably gone on a bit of a journey on that.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: The the slight flip side of it is I do think that the antithesis of the online world is real life relationships.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you were talking there about male spaces, and I think that is an area that we need to get a bit more realistic about.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think they've become, you know, masculinity seems to come with the word toxic now.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, a lot of masculinity, a lot of male spaces are brilliant.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some of my best experiences in my life have happened with groups of blokes.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, going back, so when I had kids 17 years ago, I was very bad at it.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and a friend of mine took me under his wing, um, and we set up a charity for for new dads.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's called Dads to Be.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we go around hospitals in West London and we'd spend a couple of hours with a midwife and first-time dads.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we'd get a room near the ward and we'd talk about what does life look like with kids, and we'd do the next few months and the next few years.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last exercise we did them was right, 18th birthday, what do you want them to say about you?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: How are you going to put things in place to get there?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And those sessions, we have 50 men in a room, me as the volunteer dad, and a midwife to do anything scientific or technical that came up.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the questions that were asked in those sessions, the things that were said what would absolutely not have happened uh had their partners been in the room, without a doubt.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, without I don't know if this is a PG podcast.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Say what you want.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: But and it's um, I mean, things like, you know, when will my wife's tears heal up so that I can have sex again?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or did your wife lose her figure after she had babies?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And things like that.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And having have being able to have those honest conversations about what men are thinking and what they want to say.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: But also the way they said it, there's a sort of there is definitely a male humor that is slightly different for women, that is a bit darker.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and they don't want to be judged for that, they don't want to be cancelled for that.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of those things that, you know, I was talking to a school head the other day, and he was saying some of the worst bullying that you hear happens under the guise of banter.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: But also some of the best relationships that are ever made are based almost entirely on banter.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you go into a room of old friends and they immediately blokes tend to just tear each other apart.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this almost way of saying, I love you for men.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, whereas for women, it's a bit of an anathema.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we have slightly pulled men away from being able to have these spaces where they can behave as they do.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm talking very much at a population level here.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all men are different, all women are different.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: But at a population level, you find these things to be true.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so this idea that masculinity itself is toxic and men shouldn't be allowed to meet becomes really, really unhelpful.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I mean I one more example of this where I think it's just brilliant.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I also I coach junior rugby now.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's something my kids have got me into, and I'm a terrible coach, but I have time with them or what have you.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when I first got into it, I would sort of go there and think I will impart my grade knowledge of this great sport to these young people and they will set it up.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they very much did not.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I came away from the first couple of sessions thinking, God, these guys, they don't listen to me at all, they're a total nightmare.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I doing this?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the longer you do it, you realise the point of being there is each of these 16-year-old boys has something really special in them, and it's probably not their rugby.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: For most of them, it's definitely not their rugby ability.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: But there will be something that your job as a coach or a mentor or a parent, whatever it is, your job is to bring that out of them.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, like there's this one lad, I won't use names in case they ever listen to this, there's one lad who they all think he's a great rugby player, and he's pretty good.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he might do all right, he won't make it professional, but they all love him because he's good at rugby.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I love him in that squad is he's a massive encourager.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, even if he's not playing, he'll come onto the pitch and he'll g the boys up.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, even if you don't make as a rugby player, and you probably won't, I want you in my team at work.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I want you, I want you to use this superpower of encouragement you've got in whatever you do.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got you two hours a week on a Sunday morning at the moment as a coach.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do to make sure that you develop that part of you so that when you go off into your life in a couple of years' time, you're doing that?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's another boy who we keep dropping, who is, you know, he keeps going between the A's and B's.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: I feel so sorry for him.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: He never gets a full game.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I can see he he finds it really hard.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But just talking to the end seasonal, I was like, I know this is tough for you, and that's just the nature of you know, you're not quite nailing down a place and we'll keep working on this and that.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to know that the resilience this is building in you and the fact that you keep turning up and the fact that when you get dropped, you win man of the match.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is building skills for life in a way that nothing else will, and that's really important.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason I sort of go off on that tangent, that is built in a very male environment.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have, you know, we went on a tour over the summer, 37 boys, 30 men, like mostly dads, and it is a very male environment.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: But for those boys, it is really fundamentally growing into a man by looking at the men around them and how they behave.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: It really, really matters.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if we get rid of those spaces and say that masculinity is toxic and that men shouldn't be left by themselves, you lose something really golden in the development of young men.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate John here.
• 35:02
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• 35:05
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• 35:14
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• 35:17
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• 35:30
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• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's very inspiring what you've been up to, Ed, at various points in your life.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I I've been thinking quite a lot about men and effectively wanting to engineer times where I get to spend more time just with only men because I, as I mentioned before we started recording, I didn't go to university uh in the traditional sense.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: I did it later as a mature student, but all online.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was straight out into the modern workplace.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, really, having then moved all around the country trying to get jobs, uh, I didn't really find a group of lads just to hang around with.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: And if we did, it was very infrequently, they had their own lives or whatever.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something I've been yearning for as someone who doesn't really play team sports either.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and recently I had my stag do, and we went out and did a whole bunch of bushcraft and survival skills, and effectively just having a whole bunch of lads there who were, as you can imagine, tearing each other to shreds, but at the same time building stuff together, and there was some uh doing the men living shoulder to shoulder, learning from each other some more competently others.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I came away going, I need to have more time like that.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I I've I've found myself thinking about as I'm moving back to my native Northumberland very shortly, that I've seen these issues with with boys, and I've thought I'd quite like to get involved with yeah with um with bringing them up and helping them uh understand more about the other important aspects of of life and then also striking up those relationships.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I uh I'm very intrigued to have heard your story.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I'll be in touch with some tips with that.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I appreciate your your busy man.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll we'll jump onto some other topics.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's we've talked about economics and we talked about fatherlessness, we're gonna talk about worklessness, state of work, and then we'll talk about what the state has come up with to deal with worklessness with regards to the welfare state and how important that is.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: So so how many people are at work in in Britain and what does the picture look like?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I one of the big stats over the last um year or so, and it was sort of true for this government and the last year, the last months and years, I suppose, of the government for is there are about 10 million people, uh working age people in the UK who are not in work, who are economically inactive.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not in work and they're not looking for work.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's about one in five adults.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there are lots of reasons for that.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got a lot of students uh who are you know getting on with their work, you've got people in caring, caring for elderly relatives or caring for children who opt out of the workforce.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the big concerns is the rising number of people who are long-term sick.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so of that 10 million, about a third, a bit under a third, uh are long-term sick.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been growing for a while.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's not just the number, it's the makeup of that group as well.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: So historically, you would expect it's older workers with, you know, maybe physical labor with back problems or something like that.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's still a fairly significant portion.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the the major growth is now happening in young people, which is a real concern.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's often uh related to mental health problems.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that has risen.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, going back to the the boys thing slightly, if you look at young people not in education, employment, or training um since the pandemic from pre-pandemic figures, you're looking at a rise of 40% in young men.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's risen in young women too, but it's only risen by about 7%.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: But in young men, there has been a massive rise recently.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that it's a sort of um the big economic question.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I hesitate to say this, having just had the conversation about GDP and how it rules everything, but it is it is not good to be out of work, particularly as a young man or woman.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: It has a long scarring effect uh if you are out of work when you're young.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so it is one of the big questions that the government is trying to get to grips with at the moment is how you get this large cohort of of young people back into the workforce and and doing something.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the slightly unspoken bits of all this as well is that I mentioned GDP there.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: The the drive of a lot of this is GDP, it is growth.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the government's been very clear it's number one priority is growth.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the really important bit here is actually about purpose.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's about having a reason to get up in the morning, it's about agency, it's building your own life, it's you know, being able to take on responsibility for a family or a mortgage or whatever it might be.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so it links really closely to that family conversation, Kat and that father conversation, that they're sort of two sides of the same coin.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: That as you get a good job and you can build your life and have a family and take care of them, things like that, so they play off each other.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: But in areas of the country where you don't have work or people aren't working for whatever reason, actually building that society, starting with those foundation stones doesn't tend to happen as much.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's becoming a real concern to see that is the future mapping out for a lot of young people.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the welfare state, the use of it has gone through the roof, mapping very closely to what you just described about the number of people out of work.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: What which parts of the welfare state do you think are a net positive when it comes to supporting people back into work?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: And which do you think are a net negative and uh both a a money uh a money pit and uh not good for human agency?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's a really difficult one, this.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: So at the moment there's this big fight going on over whether you scrap the two-child limit or you put more money on various other caps and things, and there's there's a sort of there's an important baseline of a safety net to say that if you fall out of work, we as a society do want to help you.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we want to make sure you're not destitute, right?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, what can we do to do that?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a part where that's really important.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: But what slightly worries me is so much of that conversation is about where do we put more handouts in the system rather than how do we help people build their own lives.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, just to give you a nuts and bolts example of that, the cost of scrapping the two child limit will be about 3.5 billion.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite expensive to do.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you had, if I just gave you 3.5 billion and said how would you solve poverty, you probably wouldn't put it there.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: You would look at, you know, there are five million people in the UK who are basically illiterate and innumerable.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: You might put it into adult education.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have huge problems of addiction in the UK at the moment, both substance uh and gambling and other things like that.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, if you give someone with those problems more money, you're really not helping them.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of other things that are holding people back that 3.5 million could address uh that that just giving as a handout isn't necessarily the ideal thing to do.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, the the point where you come to on this sort of giving money to people in trouble side is that it is a political decision.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really hard decision.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: You see how much money you've got and you've got to put it where it works best.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um the second side of it though, and the really important side, and the bit that often goes missing, is that if someone is out of work and particularly out of work long term, how do we get them back into work?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think too often what I see is um trying to use those financial levers to push people in.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if we reduce benefits, all that get them back into work, or if we increase that, or how do we manipulate the welfare system to get people into work?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: But when we work, I mentioned we work with a lot of small charities who work with people who are coming out of prison or who are long-term unemployed.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: It always, always, always starts with a trusted relationship.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: When somebody has been out of work for a long time, if they don't have any relationships around them, they will stay out of work.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you start giving them trusted relationships, they will, they will find their way back.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: It is really, it's it's almost the sort of the magic secret source that no one quite fully understands.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: But whether you're working with, I don't know, I mean what I mean, one of the absolute classics is women that take time out of work to have children and they haven't been in the workforce for five or six years, maybe, and they're looking to get back.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Often the thing that will change is confidence, that they don't have the confidence to work anymore.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, meeting other women who have been in that situation and got back into work can give them the confidence.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: Simply taking away their benefits doesn't change their confidence level, or giving them more doesn't help them.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but having that person in their life that can give them the confidence to show this is possible and they can get back to work.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Becomes really important.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's we see it in so much of our work, same with people coming out of prison.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like give them a trusted relationship and a reason to get up in the morning.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work if you don't have one of those two.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you need that trusted relationship with the job, someone who can coax them and bring them along.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, in terms of what that looks like for governments, I mean, there are these schemes that sort of roll out very small scale.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the last government spent about 300 million on something called universal support, which tries to give people those support mechanisms.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when you compare it to the overall DWP bill of, I mean, it's getting on for a third of a billion in the next few years.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's absolutely sorry, a third of a trillion is nearly 300 billion over the next few years.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: It will be massive, the DWP bill and what we spend in benefits and pensions and all the rest.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: The amount we are spending on those more relational things to give people support to get into work is really quite small.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is probably the undersold bit and where a lot more focus needs to be.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Jumping around a little here, but you mentioned people coming out of prison there.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there has been quite a lot in the news here in the United Kingdom recently about the criminal justice system.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what is the position of the Centre of Social Justice?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: How do you does the organization view the criminal justice system?
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: How it's changed, what's good, what's bad, and what do you think needs to be meaningfully reformed?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, the sentencing review has brought us the front, the sentencing review came about because prisons are full.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you've probably seen, I mean, the pictures, so I live quite near Wandsworth Prison, seen the pictures of people drinking champagne next to their Ferrari outside Wandsworth Prison with early release, it doesn't look good.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so some sort of sentencing review was needed.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, sort of drawing out quickly into the big picture what's prison for?
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, essentially, first thing is public safety.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing it does do is get people off the streets.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then it's also about um punishment and it's about rehabilitation.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: And each of those three really matters.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you have these sort of conversations which become really binary really quickly of oh, prison works or prison doesn't work.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, as a public safety thing, if we have a million murderers, I want a million murderers in prison because they are a problem for public safety, and we need to be really clear on that.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: If someone is not safe to be let out among the rest of us, then let's keep them away.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then there are these greyer areas.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where are the the less serious offenders?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: The people who probably aren't a danger to the public.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are they still ending up in prison?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: Probably, yes, because we don't have a lot of creativity.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so looking at the sentencing review, one of the things we were looking at was by all means build more prisons if if people are dangerous and need to be in prison.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, can we be a lot more creative about community sentencing, about what we do?
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the moment, we sort of say either you go to prison or you go out in the community.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: You might get a tag and the probation service might be around, but we'll see.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: Can you put much more conditions on community sentencing?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, make it harder as well.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: So people who might get a suspended sentence are now getting a proper community sentence where there will be various conditions around what they can and can't do, people they can and can't meet, alcohol monitoring, drug monitoring, drug rehabilitation, all these sorts of things.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll but the sort of the central question of that is can we just be a bit more creative about making sure people are punished, the public is safe, and people are rehabilitated?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're doing those three at once, what can we think about?
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm often I'm very drawn to the extreme international and historical examples, not because I think we should do them, but because they were much more creative.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: So going back into the mists of time, I did a classics degree and I remember learning about Athenian democracy.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a there's a passage that is a comic writer, guy called Aristophanes, and he wrote a play, and in it there's this description of a guy who gets a radish stuck up his backside, a sand radish because he committed adultery.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'm not advocating that we sanded radishes up the backside of people that commit adultery, but and that that was you know, it was within a comedy.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the sort of principles they had there was sort of public humiliation of people that do things that ruin the core.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not sure that I want public humiliation either, but I want a lot more creativity about how we sentence.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, it's just it's really poor that for hundreds, if not thousands of years, basically it's either we lock someone up or we don't lock them up.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are a million shades of gray underneath in between that.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, the most dangerous people, absolutely, regardless of the numbers, lock them up.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: But at the other end, you've got people who really aren't a danger to the public.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's something like is it one in nine or one in eight prisoners go into prison now without a drug problem and come out with a drug problem.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: So for someone who is not a danger to the public, we're often putting them there and then making them a danger to the public because they're not need to feed their drug habit.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Can we be a bit more creative about how we do that without necessarily inserting sanded radishes into the back sides of our pocket?
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: There must be things we can do.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: As amusing as it might be, uh, I would certainly be uh making sure I had no cause to be collared uh if I do a radish just going up the back passage, um, maybe even publicly.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Lingering on that topic for a moment, uh Ed West has written quite a lot about this on his Substack.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: It pops up on his Twitter um as well, where he he looks at crime rates within the United Kingdom and the state of neighborhoods, you know, that's that broken windows theory that things get bad and then all of a sudden it brings more crime.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: But effectively, what he is usually pushing is look, there are actually quite a small number of people that just commit a shed load of crimes.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you just focused on getting them in jail, and if they are repeat offenders, putting them in jail for a long time, even if they're small, they seem small, but you know, they're the house burglaries, they're things that are then create make a whole neighborhood live in fear.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, there we ought to start thinking about putting people down for much longer if they have got a long record.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'd like to get your view on uh the conversation on the death penalty, which has come out into the open.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think initially you found it in response to Axel R Radik Radikubana and the Southport uh murders.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I also know Peter Hitchens, the the uh conservative uh journalist, has written about this in his books for years, saying when we got rid of the death penalty, we got rid of the deterrent for heinous crimes, and now we see lots of heinous crimes taking place.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he recently did an interview with Freddie Sayers on Unheard talking about should we bring back the death penalty?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: He made the case for it.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what do you think the level of deterrent ought to be based on what we know about repeat offenders?
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not suggesting burglars need to be murdered.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh those who are committing very serious crimes, whether it's um the rape of children, murder, these kind of things, uh, what what where do you think society is on that question at the moment?
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you think uh think tanks like yours are?
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: So sort of slightly at the beginning of that, there there is this slightly apocryphal statistic that I can never find the source of, but says something like six percent of families commit fifty percent of crime.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: So absolutely right, it is it is really focused crime.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you find that there are communities that are absolutely blighted by it and some that get away with that any.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's right to say that there are some people who are doing a lot of crime.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, we talk about re-offending.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are some people now who are 50, 60, 70, 80 times re-offending, and it it's often drug-related, driving addiction, it might be sort of theft and burglary and things like that, but it is repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in terms of how strictware be, I remember speaking to a a head of prisons.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: This would have been probably about 10 or 15 years ago now.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'll keep it vague so you can't identify them.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: But um uh, and they were saying that they could reduce re-offending to zero.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like they had a plan to reduce re-offending to zero, and it was if you commit a crime, you get locked up.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's it, never released.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and his point was there is always gonna be a balance here.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is always gonna be a really difficult balance between just locking people up and throwing away the key and saying how much is reasonable, and that goes from the very minorest of crimes right to the most major of crimes, that we're gonna have to have difficult conversations about where the balance is.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of when you get to the really hard end of the death penalty, I mean, I'd say that's something that the CSJ has never done any work on, really.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if we would.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: But from a personal view, applying the principles, the idea that no person is salvageable worries me a bit.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um actually a lot of the principles on which we work at the CSJ is on that second chance, that third chance that actually you can change, that you can get a job, that you can succeed at school, that you can come out of prison and contribute.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the principle of you're done slightly worries me.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it might, to be honest, there are some people, I mean, I think, yeah, you're done.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: But to have that as a principle by which we run the country would be a slightly concerning one for me.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would, I would personally keep that off the table and think more about those principles of what can be done for this person.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: That said, there are absolutely cases of people who I would say put them in prison and don't let them out again.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are some really clear cases of that who are just a danger to the public.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it is that danger to the public side that is really important to remember, not just that you are irredeemable and awful, but it is you're in prison because we need to keep you separate from the rest of the population.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: Understood.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Let's uh let's think about other means of getting roofs over our heads rather than ending up in the clink.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: And let's talk about housing.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: We often talk about a housing crisis here in the United Kingdom.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we uh never build enough homes, and there are many reasons for this.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I I mean, I uh perhaps naively, but I'm pretty sure you could back this up if you bring hundreds of thousands of additional people into the country uh and you're not building even enough homes for the people that are here, then you're probably going to end up with a housing shortage and very expensive housing.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: That seems to make sense to me.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: I know some people would dismiss that and say, no, it's not really about that, it's about Russians buying London property and Arabs buying London property.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's uh probably getting rid of the whole idea of supply and demand.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: But from your work, what do you think the general population cares most about when it comes to housing?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: And let's lean on your uh experience as a policy wonk wonk.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: I know he said a very bad word there.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this has been a great conversation, Ed.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Don't take anything personally.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh how policy wonks with hands on the levers of power typically view this problem.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do they align or is there a total divergence?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a bit of a divergence.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are a few different areas.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you mentioned supply and demand there.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, firstly, just on the demand side, I think there is a growing recognition that there are a few things happening in demand that are that do need looking at.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you mentioned immigration.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: Immigration is certainly part of this.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Going back to our conversation on family breakdown, you could have 100,000 divorces a year.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: That puts serious pressure on housing stock.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, relationship breakdown is the leading cause of homelessness and has been for years.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Which again, people don't really think about.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: They think it's all about supply and what have you.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, breakup of relationship, that is how people are most likely to end up homeless.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we have the highest rate of relation breakup in the world.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, side issue.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: But those demand things definitely do need to be looked at, whether that's Russian net, billionaires buying houses, immigrants, families breaking down, whatever it is, they definitely need consideration.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think the policy conversation largely tends to look at supply, though.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like how are we building?
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are we building enough houses?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, is the answer basically.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I probably increasingly go on a bit of a journey in this, as with so many policy things.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a few years ago, I would have said this is entirely a problem of government making, entirely.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if you had absolutely no laws or regulations, or green belts, or grey belts, or brown belts, or anything else, people could build on whatever they want or whatever land they own.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying you want that, but if you had that, this would not be a conversation in terms of there being too little supply.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think we do want that.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the question then comes is how can you put the right amount of regulation in without overburdening builders and what have you?
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think at the moment it is far too regulated.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even I think everyone will have their own story of a building plan going on in their area that people have objected to.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a couple of huge ones here in Southwest London at the moment where people are drawing up battle lines.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: And my personal view is I shouldn't have a say.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am just some punter who happens to live here.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I it as soon as people like me get a say, nothing's gonna happen.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: So probably just reduce the regulation at the consultation.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: That said, I think there are new and emerging problems in this area as well.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we were talking to a house builder quite recently, uh and they were saying they'd pretty much stop building uh decent houses outside of a handful of cities where they knew they would get the return because uh materials price has gone up so much.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and also labor.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't have enough people with the construction skills to build the houses that we require at the moment.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: So even if we free up uh all this sort of red tape and glue that housing is stuck in, we don't have the people to build the houses at a price that will be affordable anyway.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that that has changed in the last few years.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: So things like steel prices went up massively after the lockdowns and what have you.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there has been this fluctuation in material prices, fluctuation in the availability of builders post-Brexit and all that sort of thing.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: But that is a slightly new angle to this that wasn't true 10 years ago.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: But fundamentally, they are all about supply as well.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do you build enough houses for enough people?
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can reduce demand as well, but I mean, birth rate of 1.4.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, you know, there's probably going to be some migration, whether or not people like it, just to make uh make up for the shortfall there.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: There are various bits of international purchase that are going to keep happening, certainly in the near future.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there's going to be a balance between all of them, but it it will come down to five.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've covered a lot of ground today about various parts of uh British society, which is creaking at the seams, I think, probably to put it lightly.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's penultimate question before I ask you the one that I ask all of my guests.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: Penultimate question being if a government wanted to tackle all of these things, to me, it feels like a party with uh uh what would be deemed an anachronistic view on things, um, thinking about character formation and maybe some more old school methods of governance uh would need to break through.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh firstly, do you agree with that?
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: And secondly, do you think that's possible based on recent cultural change which might be behind some of these issues that we've seen?
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is interesting you say anachronistic.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a quite a strange period of history, like we are the outlier.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think we need to be slightly aware of that.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, an awful lot of what I have talked about today comes back to relationships, and that's not just about families.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I talk about employment, I talk about the importance of a trusted relationship.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: When we talk about housing, the impact that relationships have on housing, when we talk about all sorts of things, relationships become really, really important.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and going back to a comment you made right at the beginning about a government that is focused on family rather than on GDP, it feels like that relational part of our lives is the thing that is struggling.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and a government that is serious about renewing the country will have to go back to that relational part of our lives.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: We did a series of reports last year on loneliness.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: And loneliness is probably the story of our age now.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that starts with the decimation of institutions, and within that, you know, it starts with the the bedrock of a family institution, but it works through labor unions or churches or sports clubs or whatever it may be.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: And a government that's serious about getting to grip with the problems we have simply doesn't have the money, apart from anything else, for the government to do it.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: It will have to go back to what are those relational institutions that built social capital in the country in years long by, uh, and how do we reinvigorate those?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it'll start with taking the family seriously and it will build out from there.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: But to your point, is that anachronistic?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's what the whole of human history has done in every successful civilization.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's us that's the weird outlier in this that we have abandoned that.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it'll be rewritten, I suppose.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see whether Britain goes down a bit of a Hungarian model and goes, let's just throw everything at trying to build the family, bring marriage bonds in.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's it's starting to work.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the Philip Pilkington book that I uh referenced, it has seen something like a 40% increase in the number of um children being born, um, something similar with regards to uh marriage rates, maybe not 40%, but a 5% increase.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: But when compared to countries in the region which has not followed those routes, you can see that whilst the Hungarian model people will say it's just not working fast enough, yeah.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is that it hasn't really been running for that long.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's been going for about 13 years, and there's already been a huge increase in people taking these things seriously and then feeling like they have the comfort to be able to do it instead of just being wrapped up in the modern industrial world we're in of consumerism and bouncing around to our outlook calendars and all the rest of it.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so, yes, let's see, let's see how we get on.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure your work will end up being quite pivotal to it, uh, given that you're one of the only organizations that are thinking about this um um, I would say rather uh non-partisan uh rather than having you don't seem to have an axe to grind in any particular direction.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: Final question for you, Ed.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: Could have been an absolute.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I there's one that always springs to mind when people ask this, and it feels like a small one, but it it was quite significant for me.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'd so I mentioned I used to be a health journalist and I used to go to the British Medical Association's annual meeting, and they would have all their motions passed about doctors' work conditions, but they'd always have quite an interesting, uh, slightly more ethical section to their discussion.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I went the way that no one quite expected me to.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: I used to be very opposed to the NHS paying for homeopathy.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think it doesn't work, it's got no evidence.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why on earth is the NHS paying for any of this stuff?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you had a series of consultants got up and reinforced my prejudices saying, yeah, no evidence, we've got to stop doing this.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then actually a series of GPs got up and they said, Look, this doesn't cost us.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: We don't think it works, or it might work by placebo or whatever, but this is costing us very little, and it gives us something in our armory to talk to patients who have difficult long-term conditions or have intractable pain or whatever it might be.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it gives us a relational weapon more than a that, you know, we don't think this is going to cure anything, but I can have this conversation, I can try something else.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: It costs us nothing.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't take it away.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it led to a sort of part of my career path has been that realization that yes, I started off as a sort of health journalist in clinical, that the evidence is always really grey around this stuff, and that life is more complex and that people aren't rational.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and sometimes the things we do they might not be completely evidence-based because you're not applying, you're not appealing to people's rationality, you're appealing to the situation you find yourself in.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think from that, you know, I I worked in health a long time.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: The moment where I thought I'm I want to get out of being a health journalist was this almost this later realization of the stuff that brings me joy in my life and the stuff that that makes people healthy and happy is nothing to do with the clinical.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's nothing to do with applying evidence-based medicine to the treatment of something.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's to do with having a reason to get up each morning, it's to do with the people who love me in my life, it's to do with those associations and friendships that I have.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that moment of changing my mind on homeopathy was quite a key moment in that for me.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was like suddenly I'm not seeing this just through a clinical lens.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm seeing the world through a lens of its complicated and that relationships and associations and belonging and purpose and all these things matter probably more than that.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, we we diminish the embodied aspect of life quite a lot.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: We've ended up living in a world of abstractions and theory and policy can be based on that.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: It can be uh driven by the the prejudices, I suppose, of those who what are trying to project the way they see the world on the rest of the world, but it's not how it actually happens in reality.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a very that's a very hopeful uh message to finish on.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, Ed, before I let you go, we we let's think about what is coming next from you, the center of social justice next.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: We know that you have the second part of the Lost Boys report coming out.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where else is your focus going to be?
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Lost Boys will definitely be part of it.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um we've touched on lots of the things actually.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be looking a bit at demography at the moment.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have real problems with birth rates, and that's gonna have massive economic impacts.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be looking at economic inactivity as well.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big part of it, the government's grappling with.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: And a big stream of work for us ongoing is school absence.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a lot of kids dropping out of school uh and a bit like that economic early scarring.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you drop out of school early, the scarring on that, the failure to get a job and etc.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: will last a long time.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, if you're interested in that sort of thing, do keep an eye out for it.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_01: And where can they find you and the CSJ's work?
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, centerforsocialjustice.org.uk on our website.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: Just type in CSJ Library into your favorite search engine and you'll find all our reports there.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: Cracking.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Ed, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for being so uh generous with your time.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's been a great conversation and uh keep fighting the good fight.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: Pleasure.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 1:05:42
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• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:05:58
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• 1:06:00
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• 1:06:07
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• 1:06:16
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