Why politicians chasing economic growth is a lie | Radical Thinking with Aditya Chakrabortty

0:00This is The Guardian's Politics Weekly feed for more episodes. I hope you enjoy it. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits that travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Ceres by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. This is a story about a society where the game was rigged. We've been here for over 60 years. What makes you think that tomorrow is going to be our day? What if someone told you the truth about the economy? Until recently, Britain was a great success story of the West, from sick man of Europe to comeback kid within a generation,

1:34and it all came down to one word. But guess what? The British economic miracle wasn't true. They got into office by pretending they knew what to do. It makes us feel kind of comfortable that it's the billionaires. It makes us feel very uncomfortable that it could be us. Despite everything governments have tried, still growth per person in the UK has gone down and down and down. There isn't a transformation. There's just a slow decline. You might not have heard of our next two guests, but I think they're vital. Carol Williams and Sukhdev Johal are two rebel economists who for years have argued this, that politicians are lying to you when they say that good times lie just around the corner and that growth alone will fix all our problems.

2:27Where has the growth gone? It's gone to those that already have a lot. From The Guardian, this is Radical Thinking with me, Aditya Chakraborty. Carol Williams, Sukhlev Johal, welcome. Carol, you can bring us bang up to date. Here's Andy Burnham, just as he was about to become Prime Minister this summer. Imagine what it would feel like to live in a country wired to work for ordinary people rather than against them. Imagine good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart. What are we to make of that? The bit that I'd pick out is the point about growth, because this is the obsession of the political classes. Badenoch and Burnham disagree about how it's to be obtained, but they're preoccupied with restoring economic growth.

3:28And it's also quite interesting to look at this historically. If you look at the Blair thing, it's really about looking to the future. We must all educate ourselves, compete. We need industries of the future, all the rest of that kind of business. Whereas now, Burnham and Badenoch are almost, in a sense, end of times. Their imagination has failed. All they can do is think about restoring 2% economic growth. And I think we are partly here with this preoccupation with growth and productivity sector, retreating into a world of imaginary figures. I think the other problem with this is it simply is not going to happen and it wouldn't fix our problems. The geopolitical world is unfavorable to sustain 2% growth. We don't have the industries and the companies. And it wouldn't solve the basic problem of most people,

4:27which is that they have a problem about affording the basics rather than their income isn't going up by one and a half or two percent per annum. I think that's an important point because it's not just about poverty anymore. it's about affordability that is going into the middle parts of kind of middle income households this is the the noise that you're getting politically it's hitting at that point and this isn't simply about the uk because last year we did some work on the united states right Right. Households in the United States, up to $100,000 a year. So pretty well off households. Middle income. Two thirds to three quarters of their income is absorbed by the basics. Housing, utilities, food, transport, and in the US, medicine.

5:24Which means the residual income is squeezed. And look at it. 30% of American households don't earn $50,000 a year, so that $5 gas is a big issue. And it screws the successful middle class couple in New York. If you look at New York and you look at the child care system, there is a large measure of assistance available up to $70,000 a year household income. Many middle class couples easily breach that. And at that point, you go from childcare state assistance to nothing. You have two preschool children, it will cost you more than $30,000 to have childcare for both of them. So you can see why Mamdani has a constituency which isn't simply of the wretched who benefit from free bus fares. It's also of middle class people who are caught in the same problems of affordability,

6:30they call it in the US, cost of living in the UK. OK. And this is not recent, by the way. It's only become aware because the media now finds that they're affected by it. And all of a sudden it becomes an issue. This has always been an issue for poor households. Sukhdev, you're stealing my best lines, I have to warn you. So you get big politicians from the biggest beast in politics promising us a bright new future. And sometimes, Carol, as you say, they can point to the statistic that shows that they're kind of right. But as we know, whole swathes of the country have gone backwards. Just outline the consequences of all of this at a local level. What does social and economic and political failure look like on the ground?

7:15What actually happens is slow and insidious because there isn't a transformation. There's just a slow decline. When I was a kid in Llanelli, you could have walked to Talbot and every couple of miles you would have seen a high-wage manufacturing establishment. And all of these places were centres of high-wage male, semi-skilled employment. When I was brought up, Llanelli Steel, which produced specialist steels, was known as the Klondike locally. And everybody called Port Talbot Treasure Island. Hang on, the Klondike because they were paid in gold? No, no, because the wages were so good. And Treasure Island in Port Talbot, because the wages were so good. And for a while it kind of worked when they started to close the small coal mines on the western edge of the coal field where I was.

8:20You know, three or four miners got into a car and they went down to Fort Jersey Marine and they made back axles for Ford, you know. But bit by bit, all of that was stripped out. Right. economy, which is dependent on the public sector, which 30% plus of employment, and where private firms are typically micro or SME, and many of them are low productivity, providing local systems. So what hits you in the eye when you go to Port Alba or Clonetney now? The most obvious one is the place was full of off-shift workers with prams and partners enjoying the life of an affluent 1960s worker. But that kind of affluent worker vibe is gone and you've now got a kind of making do ethos. And that kind of translates into one way Jonah could support a family.

9:32Right. Now you struggle with two to support a family. So man and woman or man and man, they can both be at work, but they still haven't got enough coming in. They can both be in work and still not be able to make the ends meet. So it's not just an income problem. It's what your money is going out on. We've talked about this in terms of kind of a fall and below. And we use that as an example in terms of fall and below. People have expectations. Spell out fall and below. Yeah, fall and below. People have expectations of what their lifestyle should be. And the expectations are what? You have enough on your table? No, the basics you really don't have to worry too much about because your income meets that. The residual is what you have left over for a lifestyle that you've become accustomed

10:17to. When the basics start to encroach on the residual, it's a spike that people notice immediately. The assumption is that it's poor people. No, no. This goes into middle income households. And on those kind of the fallen below, those kind of expectations are encroached upon and people feel it. It translates not only economically, it translates socially and politically. Yeah. And there are two aspects to this, really, as Sukhdev was saying about low and middle income groups. At the bottom of society, people face brutal, absolute choices, heating versus eating in the UK, or $5 gas in California now. And these, really, you do one thing and you can't do something else, which is essential. In the middle of society, there is a problem about relativity, expectations,

11:14and what we've called, Sukhdev, participation tickets. You know, like home ownership is a participation ticket for the middle classes. You're not properly middle class unless you're at least on the way to owning a house or a flat. That's why this whole business of first time buyers and all the rest of it is culturally so important in the UK. But you have the problem then that people are priced out of home ownership. And so the falling below expectations is not simply a problem about the poor. It's also about middle income groups. And this, as Sukhdev was saying, has political consequences. It makes everything very vulnerable. When you have three anxieties, you have an economic anxiety, you have a status anxiety and an intergenerational anxiety.

12:10Put that round a dinner table tonight. What do you get? Volatility. Keep going. The assumption is that things have to change. Politically, we're starting to see this in the electorate, where it oscillates from one place to another. This assumption is just an economic crisis. There's a status problem here. People have become accustomed to their status, and the status now comes under pressure. I mean, journalists, I mean, I guess you'd be able to tell us a story about how journalism has gone from, you know, top of the table, and it's coming down very slowly, but surely. Tell me about it. Economic status. There is also the intergenerational anxiety, which is your children, their prospects are poorer than your ones.

12:55That in itself creates a kind of a tension. The result is broadly a politics of short-lived enthusiasms, which are attached to particular figures or parties and move on fairly quickly because you could think about it in terms of the enthusiasm on the left, the enthusiasm of young people for Corbyn and then the more recent enthusiasm for the Greens and Polanski. And now a bit of a wobble around there because will Burnham be the next enthusiasm or will he disappoint? And there's also a sense in which people can commit to a vision, you know, like Johnson, you know, somehow or other leveling up was going to happen. And then when it turns out to be messy, they move elsewhere very rapidly. But let's let's thread these two strands together. Right.

13:54Because on the one hand, you have the kind of material conditions that you're describing right now as a result of all of this stuff that's happened over the past 50 years. And on the other hand, you've got 50 years of false promises, right? And this is still visible where I'm from in North London, an old factory suburb. They turned one of the old factory sites into what was supposed to be a Silicon Valley business park. The only thing that's left there now is an academy school and a fast food restaurant. We are surrounded with this kind of the physical architecture of all of these fake promises. But you also have a deep underlying cynicism that politics, the state can actually deliver for you.

14:35What we're not facing up to is that we have all this hot air, as though talking about it is going to produce this kind of growth. We're not looking at the structural problems and also the structural conditions of the areas that they're saying you too have to look like these kind of rapidly, you know, go with kind of places that you really need to emulate. There's no consideration of the places, what they look like, what they are and how they function. All of this leads to this kind of ritual commitment of resources for negligible results to shiny, shiny things without people sitting down and thinking, what kind of leverage do we have? And we don't really have any large British owned companies operating in most of these shiny,

15:28shiny areas. And if the Japanese were kind to us in the 1980s, the Chinese are now going to Spain and Turkey. So things are happening all around us. And we think if we make this ritual commitment of resources and say 4,200 jobs, we're going to get something different. We've been here for over 60 years. What makes you think that tomorrow is going to be our day? But there's this awful condescending language about left behind, as though places which have been de-industrialized and low income are to some extent worse than behind the curve. Now, Sukhdev and I have been working in the Slate Valleys for five years. And I would say that on any kind of measures of functioning society, local identity, they would count very high.

16:27This isn't a place which is not working. It's a low income place. And what we need to say is we don't need Sukhdev to turn low income places into high income places, which wouldn't in any case deal with the loss of necessities and is not going to happen. We need to say, how do low income places work? And what do we need to do to get them to work better on the production and the consumption side? And this is a very hard sell indeed in the UK. I want to talk a bit more about this supposed magic trick of turning low wage places into high wage places, and in fact, turning a low wage country into a high wage country. And put this within the context of the last 10 years of British politics, because people in the UK, people outside the UK, they look at Britain now and they think,

17:22oh my God, seven prime ministers in the last 10 years. These people are a joke. And you can certainly say that that's down to Westminster chaos. But you could also say that each of these prime ministers has come along with a promise of how they're going to get the economy motoring again. Right. They're really going to get revved up. And just as David Bowie said, they keep on crashing in the same car. Now, when I started writing about economics a quarter of a century ago, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they used to talk about how they could get the UK up to 3% growth a year. Nowadays, the government celebrates if it gets over 1% growth a year. Are these people lying? Are the politicians lying to us or are they deluded?

18:08I think we need to kind of separate two points here. One is the politics of it all. People want the promises. They want you to flick a switch that nobody else has noticed hasn't been switched and it's all going to fix their kind of problems. The reality is that we won't do the kind of the getting your hands dirty. We've got vested interests. We need to kind of think through what are the basics, the necessities that we need to fix people's needs for basic necessity to have a decent civilized life. We're not even thinking about that. I'll bring it down to kind of something that you don't give much thought to, water. Most people, they turn the tap on, water comes out, they're quite happy. Flush the toilet, a few seconds later, yeah, it's disposed of. You're

18:55not really worried about where it's gone. Between that, we have no understanding of what the mechanics are underneath this, how much capital is required. And what we have is this cartoon kind of thing of, ah, yeah, baddie, go after them now. Get them, get them out of the sea. Put new people in, public sector, put them in. That's going to fix the problem. What we don't do is to say, what is the underlying structural problems here? Why is the water industry that started off debt free so now riddled with debt and polluting our rivers and having kind of a crisis about how we're going to deal with climate change? We don't do the kind of the mechanics well and we're going to have to take on people who have more money in their pocket and charge those people more for their water and reduce the costs for those who can't afford it.

19:53But let's move the plane up a few thousand feet, right? OK. You have Theresa May and she says, oh, we need to have a Brexit. And I've been lumbered with things that will get the country going. You have Boris Johnson and he says Brexit and levelling up, that will do it for the country. When he goes, you get Liz Truss and she says, if we just cut taxes and regulation, that will get the country going. Then you have Rishi Sunak and he says, if we have more AI and tech, that will get the country going. Then you go on to Keir Starmer. We just need stable government. We can't have any more mad people in charge. That will get the country going. And now you have Andy Burnham who says good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart. Right. So at a national level, you have prime minister after prime minister. My oldest daughter is seven years old. She can do a recital of all the prime ministers that have been in charge since she was born. She goes from Theresa May all the way through to Andy Burnham today.

20:46What is happening when they keep on making these false promises and none of them come off? Aditya, you went through all the seven prime ministers as well. I mean, congratulations to your daughter for teaching you something. Look, our problems are multiple. They're complex. They're interrelated. And they're kind of associated not only with kind of the way that we organise, say, for example, our basic needs, but also just the basic things that we give little thought to. There's another aspect to this, which is what I'd call the burden of the officer class. Even when they don't know what to do, they have to pretend they know what to do. And I do think there is this business which applies to the seven prime ministers. They got into office by pretending

21:33they knew what to do. And then there's the other thing, which is the general desire of those in government to actually claim or assume that government controls the levers which can be pulled classically from the centre or the top of a system and presto things will change for the better without even paying much attention to the fact that we live in a multi-level system where quite often you can pull at the top but nothing happens. This is a marvellous picture of Britain today. You're saying that basically we're run by officers who don't really know what to do and think that if they can just clang around pulling at levers maybe something will happen. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. Even when we have the opportunity, we're incapable of making those decisions

22:24that will change people's lives. One thing that a lot of people say about the political nastiness of Britain and Europe today is that it's a natural result of economic weakness, that if you get a zero growth economy, you end up with zero sum politics in which you and I are scrapping over the same crumbs on the table. How do we avoid that? Well, I think that's a very top-down centrist way of looking at it, basically. I'm just quoting the FT to you, that's all. Very much more difficult to manage competing claims. I don't think that at a day-by-day level this is the reality of what's happening. This isn't a story about the working class squabbling amongst themselves. It's a story about a society where the game was rigged so that some people got better off while other people, because of structural change,

23:26got worse off. After the financial crisis, for 10 years, we had roughly zero interest rates. That basically almost inevitably inflated asset values. For anybody who held property or shares or whatever, it was good. That's not the result of people scrapping amongst themselves. It's the result of Bank of England and central bank decisions. So what you're saying is they keep talking about growth. And meanwhile, they're taking money out of our pockets and handing off to the people who already own assets. Is that right? Look, first of all, let's take our role. We have had growth. Where has the growth gone? It's gone to those, the households that already have a lot. It's quite reasonable for those who haven't benefited from it to complain about it, but they

24:17don't have the political voice because after all, they're not the go-getters, et cetera, in the political kind of discourse. If you actually have growth and the benefits equally distributed, clearly, if everybody is X percent better off and you start with a larger base of income than I have, you're going to get much more than me yeah and 25 of all the growth that we've had in in in incomes has gone to one group not the billionaires because we that makes us feel kind of comfortable it's not us i think we need to kind of take responsibility that it is us because the top 10 of how households by income have captured 25% of the growth in income. Over what period? Over 90, it goes 76 down to... So over the past 50 years, you're saying households

25:14with two doctors marrying each other, two head teachers, say they've made off with a tonne of the national income that's come in. Yes, and they have a lifestyle. And these aren't the billionaires and millionaires of the imagination. Look, it makes us feel kind of comfortable that it's the billionaires. It makes us feel very uncomfortable that it could be us. I think this is absolutely central. And this is also important to understanding the kind of ambiguity of the times that we live in. There are, of course, large numbers of middle class kids who are, you know, flat renting, fall below expectations. But the idea that the 50 years of experiment inaugurated by Thatcher led to everybody losing

26:01is just nonsense. There were large numbers of gainers. Who did pretty well, thank you. Who did pretty well because they were in middle, typically in middle management or public sector positions when management salaries relative to those of workers were increasing. And I think all of this means, you know, you've got all these baby boomers who are the people who are the real beneficiaries of the Thatcher settlement. What you're saying, you've got all the stats, you've got all the zingers. Let me quote you what Chancellor John Healey said at a recent Labour Party conference. He said, without growth, there is no social democracy. Basically, you can't just cut up the cake differently. It needs to be bigger.

26:53What do you say to that, Sukhdev? Because politically, it helps him if you get growth because it fixes all the kind of problems, which you really don't know what to do anyway. You're just pretending that you do know. And I take issue about kind of slicing the cake. I would really take kind of issue on this. We rarely ask kind of what the kind of, how many people on our blue chip companies are actually on universal credit, some kind of supplement. We rarely look at kind of the income inequality in the workplace. We rarely kind of consider our place in society. We have an impressionistic kind of feel to where we are. But as I've kind of pointed out to you, we have had growth. We have had winners.

27:33But once you have the losers and the losers become increasingly larger and they're going into, as we've talked about, the affordability kind of crisis in America, it goes into the middle income households. Here, it does translate into kind of politics. People can see that they haven't benefited. They can see that they're looking for somebody to fix their problems and the politicians feed off that, which is, I will fix your problems. If it isn't the boats, it's going to be kind of, you know, I'm going to fix social democracy. We can't, we've got to grow the cake. All of these kind of resonate with kind of people who are desperate for a fix in their lives. And we're not going to fix them by just endlessly talking about it. We're

28:16going to have to tackle the issues of inequality because we rarely now talk about kind of inequality. of a trusted global brand. With Series by Marriott, you get both. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays, while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. You save, you invest, you keep an eye on spending. So why do your finances still feel so complicated? Quicken helps you put the whole picture together and make sense of what to do

29:16next. Connect accounts from more than 14,000 financial institutions and see how all the different pieces of your financial life fit together. With Quicken, you can make sense of your options and decide what to do next. Quicken. Know what to do next. See how at Quicken.com. When you talk about affordability, you're quite right. We are in the middle of what the political class call a cost of living crisis. If growth is one concept we've heard for decades, the cost of living has been the concept of the 2020s, right? At the same time, we're coming to the end of an era. The end of an era of cheap food, cheap fuel, cheap money. Given your analysis, what on earth do we do about that? What should Andy Burnham do about that?

30:10You should actually start to live in the world that exists rather than promise to create a different world, which is an imaginary that can't be realised. I think it's as simple as that. If you promise growth and don't deliver growth, and growth in any case, as Sukhdev was saying, is not going to fix the problem, what are you doing about the specifics of the cost of living? I mean, in Wales, for example, 29% of households are on universal credit. How do you make a low-income society more livable for people by, for example, changing utility charging? I want to hear from you two what you would do about the cost of living crisis. We're going to what looks like a pretty hard winter. Energy prices have already gone up this month.

31:04They'll be going up again in January if the forecasts are correct. What should the government be doing? Carol and I have been discussing this. I mean, Burnham has made a fair start, removed VAT from kind of... Energy bills. term, we need to kind of think about and get out of the mindset that we have to charge for our utilities, our basic utility necessities, based on consumption rather than household income. And that matters because what we've had over the last 40 years is we have charged the richest households less proportionately than we have the poor. Let me give you one example of this. The poorest 10% of households pay 2% of their total expenditure in the year on water. The richest households pay half a percent. Now, why is it acceptable to charge the poorest households

32:072% of their total expenditure and not the richest households? Now, that's not a rhetorical question. You've been asking the question. I'm asking you, Aditya. Why is that okay? And you can also relate that to the specifics. I mean, Sukhdev's made the point about percentages, which an economist would call regressive, i.e. the poor pay more. You've also got to look at the absolute size of the bill. When the bills go up next January, the typical dual fuel energy bill for gas and electricity will be £2,000 in households which are paying roughly £600 for water. £2,600 of post-tax income. We need immediately to ease the burden on low-income groups and at the same time plan to increase the burden on high-income groups.

33:05Sukhdev, just spell out this radical idea. Just spell it out, because I think this is very important. What you're saying is stop charging for the use of water and energy according to how much you use. Start charging by how much money a household has. Is that right? Yes. So it becomes like an income tax. But we can't say that anymore because the political discourse is kind of toxic, isn't that? Right. Yes. So it becomes like an income tax. But we can't say that because the political discourse is kind of toxic. But that's effectively what you'd want to make it progressive. In an ideal world, yes. But we have to now work on the opposite side. You've done the workings on this. I've seen them. And as far as I can remember, you say something like 70% of households would actually be better off under the kind of

33:45systems that you're mapping out yes um so it would be it would be on that ground it would be popular let me let me translate this kind of politically um what kind of politician would be capable of saying 70 of you will pay no more 50 you'll pay significantly less. But the 30% over there, and particularly the top 10% will pay more. Why can't we translate that into practical politics? Because if we see water and utilities, not as an ownership issue, but we're custodians, we need to put enough investment in there. We need to make it affordable. We need to create the material conditions for people when they wake up in the morning, not struggle for the basic necessities. If we can fix those kind of problems, right? Our problem is this political. We have the ideas.

34:38There isn't a shortage of ideas, right? This is what we've been working on, but you can fix the problem if you have the politics. But it also does depend on making a shift to understanding the check at the end of the year to settle their tax obligation. What has happened since then is, of course, that we've had a huge rise in female participation in the workforce, which is now less than 5% behind male participation. So you've got large numbers of dual-income households. They aren't all of them doing wonderfully. The classic working class dual income household has a husband in full term employment and a partner in part-time local service employment as a school dinner lady or something of that sort. But in the middle classes,

35:59you've got this significant group because like marries like in the middle classes. So you've got two managers, two professionals together. And it's very easy. If you have two doctors, for example, it's very difficult for them to earn less than £250,000 a year. And this is not recognised in the existing individual tax system. Sukhdev and I would favour charging for utilities and indeed levying income tax on a household income basis, because that's much more realistic as a basis for working out how affluent you are. And incidentally... Just break that.ally this is so important i want you just to break that down very simply so what do you when you say that you would want to have income tax levied not per person but across households you're effectively saying that that would release more

36:58cash from i think it would shift the burden it would shift the burden. It would shift the burden. If we just see it as just increasing the pot, we'd miss the fact that we're making society fairer. There are some people with big pots who are doing very nicely out of the present system of utility charging, individual income tax, and all the rest of that. And what we're saying, in a sense, is that the failure of our society is not simply a failure of poverty, of not affordability on essentials, heating versus eating. It's a failure to tackle those who are the privileged beneficiaries of the settlement, who are not hedge fund managers but ordinary middle-class dual-income couples. I mean I would really love to hear what people

37:51watching this or listening to this make of these arguments. Please do put your comments in the chat. Sukhdev, what I love about this, we've started off talking about growth and growth and growth, politicians talk about growth and you're saying. Politicians talk about growth. And you're saying to me, we need to think about redistribution. I didn't use that word. I know. I'm giving it to you. Is that right? But is that right? Yes, of course it's right. But it also kind of reflects the changes and the shifts that have happened in society that we've ended up at the point that we're in. So all the growth talk over the past 50 years has led to this massive inequality. And now you're saying now it's time to make things fairer, right?

38:32I think the central foundational concept is of contribution. Right. And there are different ways in which people contribute to society. And we must recognise the different ways in which they contribute to society. And we must recognize the different ways in which they contribute to the society. But the financial contribution to collective services should be based on household income. You can think of this contribution principle as being about recognizing the different orders of worth in the economy. Clearly, we need aggressive private sector firms where people pursue output growth and productivity and all the rest of that. And profit. So you're not saying do away with banks, do away with tech firms.

39:21No, no, no. But you are saying... That's part of it. This crap about wealth creation. People contribute in different ways to society. And we need to recognize their different contribution. And the revolutionary thing is we would extend the idea of contribution to production and to the idea that it's not simply the firms which are high productivity, competitive, growing or whatever. The small, low productivity firms which make local societies work at low income are crucial. I want to just come back to you a bit on what you said about politics. You said there's a constituency, there are people who would vote for more fairness. There are people who live and depend on these mundane bits of our economy, the things that politicians don't see. And you

40:17were saying to me, Westminster don't see them, they're not capable of making the argument for them. I'd like to end by really asking you where you see politicians or countries where they are willing to argue for them. One of the examples I might give to you is Zoran Mamdani in New York. When he talks about pothole politics or sewage socialism, he's basically giving me the gospel of Sukhdev Johal, isn't he? I think we reached the same point from different starting points. He's actually gone around and spoken to people what kind of concerns them. We have that kind of lived experience, but we've also looked at it through kind of, you know, the prism of the statistics and the company and the reporting accounts and tried to kind of build some kind of framework.

41:02But I would kind of take issue with one thing, which is the cost of living crisis as though it's just dropped from the sky. Poor people have already been in the cost of living crisis before it was an issue. And we need to kind of respect that they have been living on the edge for a really long time. I would take issue in the politics because it's largely become the middle class is talking on behalf of poor people. When are we going to reach a kind of a point where we're going to allow these people to speak for themselves? Not only speak for themselves, but have power and the finger on the switch occasionally. What we've had in this, and we've not discussed this, we've talked about growth and we've talked about all other issues, and we've not discussed this, we've talked about growth,

41:49we've talked about all other issues, but we've not talked about kind of virtually kind of the removal of working class people from parliament, from our politics, right? Who can actually get up in parliament now, who can say, you know, what it feels like to make kind of ends meet, what it feels like at the end of the week where there's not enough money to do the things that you really want to do to bring a family up. When are we going to shift this where we don't have engineered candidates, we have local candidates. And when they look out their window, they actually know somebody outside the window. They've probably went to school with them. They can represent what it's like outside. That's important. We're now going to see some kind of shift in here where there

42:31has been a change, where it is in Wales, where Plaid is now in government. For the first time. Yes, but they've been on the outside, but they have been on the ground. I'm not saying that Labour wasn't on the ground, but now you get the opportunity for perhaps new ideas, some fresh thinking and an input from people who were on the outside and were never invited in. I think people have to put the politics together, which is where Mamdani is clever. I mean, as Sukhdev was saying, the key thing is leaving the abstractions to one side and actually talking to people about their lived experience. I think as an insurgent candidate in New York, he was absolutely brilliant at that. And he also realized that he needed a

43:22coalition of, you know, middle class professionals screwed on the childcare business and people who wanted free buses. So he's created a coalition of the hard press middle classes and the working classes, always ignored. Yes. And I think... It's the political machine as well. That's not about his migrant background, his race or whatever. It's just he is smart in a way that Healy was not smart when he was saying about without growth, there will be no social democracy. And there's a kind of element of smartness to Burnham, although he's very, you know, he's got a socio-political agenda about care, electoral reform, etc. But he's very confused on the economy, as you can see with 40 years of neoliberalism criticised, but at the same time defending Abu Dhabi in East Manchester. So I think,

44:21you know, he doesn't have the clarity which Mamdani had as an insurgent about. Let's talk to people. Let's find out. He's put his finger on where the pressure points were across different classes. And he pressed at the right time at the right place. This is a series about radical thinking. Tomorrow morning, Sukhdev Johal, you woke up and you had a billion pounds for the day. What would you do with that money and that power? I can't fix problems with a billion pounds, I'm afraid. That's not possible. So how would you spend it? How would I spend it? I'm going to throw out the helicopter. Really, it's not a kind of a question that I wake up in the morning and think, what would I do with a billion pounds? I could tell you what I would do with 10 billion pounds.

45:09Go on. Right? I would immediately make livability much more affordable for the poorest in society. Immediately. And how would you use 10 billion pounds to do that? I wouldn't put it into kind of grand schemes about kind of manufacturing renaissance or giving kind of subsidies to our large companies, because they were already going to invest. We should think about creative policies that touch the places that Carol has talked about, the Gwynedd and the small enterprises, that haven't been touched by policies, that haven't received the money. I don't think there's anything sensible you can do with a billion pounds or 10 billion pounds, but you might be able to decide on some policy priorities.

45:49I think Sukhdev has completely correctly identified the idea that the people at the bottom end of society are absolutely deprived. And the priority, as with utility charging or whatever, if you've got helicopter money, we could add something for that, because people should not have to choose between heating and eating or be unable to afford school shoes or school uniforms at the beginning of each year. That is undignified, inhumane, and it would be sensible to put money applied to that. They are coming up with ideas that will make their own lives and people around them's lives better. But that's going to be hard work to reach them. And what we've not done is the hard work of reaching them. What we've done is the easy work of the big photo opportunity, big factory in the

46:41background, lots of people in high-vis jackets, and we're going to fix your problem. They've not been fixing our problems for 60 years. What makes you think they're going to fix it now? That is an excellent point at which to end. Sukhdev Johal, Carol Williams, thank you very much. Two big things came out of that chat with Carol and Sukhdev. First were the 50 years of false promises of a bright, shiny new future that never turned up. Even while the country became more unequal and working households saw money taken off them. But the second was a complaint that people have had about politics for ages. That there's no vision. The best today's political class can offer you is a future that's maybe, what,

47:252% better than it is today, which isn't much really. These two are offering you something different. Politicians of old would have called it the good life. Prime Ministers obsess over high-speed rail and tech companies, but Karen Sukdev want a society that gives you what you need at a price you can afford. They talk about care homes, schools, parks. It sounds humdrum every day. But as Philip Larkin said, our days are where we live. So why aren't we talking about this? I'd love to know your thoughts. And before you go, can I recommend you check out NASA, our new award-winning documentary. From two of the Oscar-winning directors of No Other Land, Nasser reveals the secret systems used by Israel's military

48:13in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Produced by The Guardian, it's a documentary that the Israeli government doesn't want you to see. And it's on now in cinemas around the world. Go see it. This episode was produced by Frankie Tobey and Luke Smith. The executive producers were Maz Ebtahaj, Kirstie Major and James Tindale. This has been Radical Thinking with me, Adit Chakraborty from The Guardian. Thanks for listening. This is The Guardian. Cash Now, More Later from Opendoor gives you cash up front for your home, plus all the profit later. That's no chaos now, no cash left behind later. Skip the showings now, all the profit later that's no chaos now no cash left behind later

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