Keir Starmer learns from Tories’ big election mistake | How To Win An Election

learned what the

mistake

was that Theresa May made in 2017: she did not speak with her cabinet or include her cabinet in the drafting of that Manifesto. The takeaway from the two Chiefs of Staff was that the cabinet didn't actually see the manifesto until they were packed. on a bus a copy was presented uh within an hour of its actual release at the beginning of the campaign to the public no, it's not good, I'm delighted to be considered smarter than both of them. I'd like a deck Anon, you know my man Jeremy, I love what he says.

I love Taylor Swift, okay, keep it light, Peter, yeah, we're back, here's how to win an

election

, your insider's guide to a big political year. I'm Matt Jolie, accompanied as always by new work brain Peter. Madson Polly mcken is a politician McKenzie former policy director for Nick C and Tori Brainbox Daniel Finlin if you want to get in touch with any questions. In fact, next week's episode will be all your questions, so get in touch if you want. email us how to win times.co or you can WhatsApp 033 2353 send us a voice note and you can hear yourself on next week's podcast episode, but let's focus on this week in a moment we're going to talk about manifestos. and who writes them and what you should put in them and what you shouldn't, but Peter, you were in the news again at the weekend, writing in the Sunday Times about Labour's plans to reform workers' rights, including banning jobs of zero hours. and you warned against rushing them and then upset the unions.

US Secretary General Sharon Graham said Peter Merson earns his living as a consultant for private corporations, his constant attack on workers' rights and that he is driven by his personal financial interests, as well as his old-fashioned desire to see the work reduced to a neoliberal tribute act of the 1990s, wow, yes, God, and as if you worked for the corn as if I worked for the corn, and then yesterday the Secretary General of the TU came and supported it. I mean, on some level, this is a ridiculous story and a cup of tea. I mean, it's an argument about absolutely nothing at all because I wrote in my article in the Sunday Times that I supported the case for reform and I backed it and when I was outlining broadly what the union was proposing.

I was directly quoting R Shaw Reeves and when I said it would be a good idea to consult and bring in the employer, I was echoing everything K sta has said to date. Why was it touching such a sensitive nerve and I think it was because these people who spoke against me think that you know once the movement has decided, you know that's it, you know we just agree with each other to convey what What we want? do and everyone has to accept it now. My point of view is slightly different because if the Labor Party constantly talks about partnership with companies, you cannot talk to them about everything related to the partnership, except about what most directly affects them, which is the labor market and legislation. union, and if you're trying to create an economy where you're providing security for workers, you're trying to create opportunities for flexibility for people where they want it.

If we try to create mobility both for people and to make the economy go well, we will have to look at rather more specific proposals and consult not only unions but also employers, and that's it. He was echoing as he said everything K Dharma has said to date, but you would have thought you knew Armageddon had arrived safely. Can I add another point about what she said, which is not what a lot of people make? your private sector corn uh, in fact, oh, that's a crime, that's a crime, that's a crime, do that and it would be a good idea if we grew a lot of corn and earned a lot of corn, so this idea of ​​trying I casually disdain the fact that anyone can earn some corn from the private sector, how do you think we have a public sector if we don't have a private sector?

Yes, there is another point too, um, the Secretary General of the ECA when he came yesterday said that he made fun of me for being a member of the House of Lords, what does he know about workers and how much they should be paid, but you know , aside from the fact that I actually signed the law into law, the national minimum? salary in this country in 1998, when I was commercial industry secretary, I also introduced fair treatment at work legislation, by the way, in 1998 and my first job when I left university was in the Economic Department at TU, certainly before he was uh. uh born um but but but but here's the point that this legislation, which is going to be controversial, always will be, has to go through the House of Lords, yes, and Labor peers are a minority in the House of Lords.

Lords and therefore we are going to have to persuade a lot of other parties, the Liberal Democrats, a lot of cross peers, uh, peers, you know, to give this legislation some goodwill and a tailwind, you know, saying that you know that members of the House of Lords have no right to express an opinion. In my opinion, it's not a good place to start. Should we talk about politics? I want to talk about corn. I have never been paid in corn. I have always been paid in good old British Pound Sterling. Well, no euros for you, oh no, no.

Of course not, of course not, so I remember Ed Milland was against Zero Hour contracts and he used to talk about ending exploitative Zero Hour contracts. I think you often hear this kind of linguistic trick from politicians, which is ambiguous and exploitative. hours contract sounds like you are going to end zero hours contracts because they are exploitative, actually what he was proposing at the time, although I think he was just saying zero contracts in Edstone in 2015, what he was proposing was a set relatively sensible set of regulations to ensure that zero hours contracts cannot be used exploitatively.

In fact, Vince Cable during the Coalition years was consulted on a lot of proposals, there have been a number of reviews setting out a variety of really sensible ways of regulating zero contracts so that when they're being used for a long time, you know , month after month, year after year, and the idea is that you can just pull the rug out from under someone even though they've had regular work hours, that's a zero hours exploitative contract, but I think politicians get into it in a mess when they overpromise and make it seem like what we're going to do is get rid of them because they're dealing with slogans, but Terri terrible cop puts her finger on the knob of The issue that Angela Rena pointed out to me when we were talking about this ago a few weeks there are different ways to abolish or reform zero-hours contracts.

There is no single, standard solution. This is what you do and that's it. There are different. ways to do this and, in fact, the low pay commission has looked at zero hours contracts and concluded that they literally cannot and should not be banned, but legislation can be introduced to curb the most egregious behaviour, the exploitative behavior of employers, and that is what we got. to consult, but I guess I won't call him because obviously we're just having a public policy discussion, but what this points to is the problem that workers will have this year when they finally start putting some meat on the basics of what they are planning to do and the competing demands of what might be popular with the public, what might be popular with Labor MPs and what the unions will know and that is at risk of growing and going to talk. about manifestos, and manifestos are often full of pretty clever phrases that could mean that you're banning everything or just kind of exploitation and it's then, when you get to government, that you really have to undo it and make it into something.

The legislation and The ambiguity has to be eradicated and that's when you can start with one of the things: I mean, people obviously don't hear even the original promise, but even when they hear that, they often don't listen and they're not really supposed to hear the condition, so obviously that the exploitative use was quite deliberate. I think Ed Ed Mipan probably knew what he was doing and what he was conveying and then politicians end up in a position where people think they have promised something that they feel. in good faith they didn't promise um and uh, you know, certainly, the conservative party between 1992 and 1997 I think suffered as a result of conveying to people that they would never raise taxes, uh, when they were going to have to. and then I felt, you know, upset because they hadn't actually said that, but they had given that impression and people had taken it away.

It's called the weasel-words approach to policy-making and Manifesto writing and I think certainly in an area of ​​the labor market and trade union rights, which is such a complex area, as I know from my own ministerial experience, it is a some specificity is a good idea, not least because when we enter an electoral campaign as we will with these proposals, they will be used as a weapon against us by the conservative party and others, it would have been better to have spoken to the employers' organizations before putting them in a position give and take about what we're proposing, at least put them in some kind of neutrality about it so that they can't then be leveraged on the DOR side is when they're busy attacking us and I think that's a much better political approach on the part of the Party Labor would simply say that we have decided that the National Policy Forum has met with the movement. has decided and that's it, well, we'll move on to the details of the Manifesto in a moment.

I also want to ask Danny as MPS packs up and heads off for their Easter break, it's a good thing you're stopping them plotting in Westminster, or is it? The bad thing is that they go back and meet with their constituents and discover that they are even less popular than they thought. Well, you can guess what my answer will be. I'm not sure it makes a big difference between those two things. a difference from what we write in uh, what the Lobby correspondents write and um, you know the kind of noise in politics and I guess it gives you the impression that, in general, the leaders probably find that it is a good period in which they can develop their own narratives and s

tories

and use it to try to set the agenda they want to set and be subject to less not particularly useful advice from people telling them what they should do, so generally speaking it's probably useful for the marginal leaderships, but in general, you know.

I don't think that kind of political gossip is that central to the outcome of any

election

. I think it would be local elections that would provide a sort of trigger point for people to potentially change their mind about a thing. one side or the other of this debate, uh, and two weeks of gossiping with your constituents or two weeks of gossiping with your colleagues in Room T at Westminster probably won't make any difference either way until you get that kind of trigger point for results. probably quite disastrous in the elections Yesterday I met a Conservative MP and wished him a happy recess.

I told him, you know, I hope your date with the voters goes well haha ​​and he said we're going to be, he said, "We're going to spend our time," he said, polishing our CVS and polishing our interview view suits, he said waiting polish a suit, how do you polish a suit? being shiny with me, I want a shiny suit, well, look, we just pass, we win. I'm not asking you to do more fashion advice interviews, let's go, let's get rid of image ties and the rest, for being there, done, see? I just lost weight, I got the t-shirt, thank you very much, I didn't do such a thing, But the truth is, you can feel a little sorry for Rishi Sunak, just a little.

I mean, he has good message discipline. He now continues with his plan all the time. We have the plan. Don't finish the plan. Don't abandon the plan, see the plan through whatever the plan is, he'll go all over the country by helicopter to different Target seats and regions to meet people with his slightly too good style, rehearse sound bites, You know, pretty decent sound bites, Earnest. They're fragments, but everything he does is just met by his party and they seem determined to lose the election because many of them have lost faith in his ability to win it and just seem to want to give him such a bad, difficult time.

As they can it is almost unfair. Do you feel sorry for him Polly? I think he can afford a new suit for his job interviews after being prime minister, you know, what I mean is, of course, I was talking to the prime minister polishing his suits, but from the human perspective, of course, but you know that you don't enter this life of politics without the expectation that it's going to be difficult. I think the vibe you get from Rishi Sunak is feeling a little resentful. about the fact that it is difficult to be Prime Minister if I don't have much sympathy for it and but I do think that thisThe context that the Conservative party has created around them is incredibly difficult, they are basically having a sort of collective panic attack, they need to do some mindfulness exercises and think about what is really in front of them.

The strategy as Peter describes it is the best strategy available to them, meaning the plan is working. People should stick with the plan, which is almost certainly not a winning strategy, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best strategy to minimize your losses. The problem is that no one can really accept the idea that they could lose and that's why they are looking to damage the strategy with you know this type of collective panic attack well, we're just in the strategy and what happened last week and, since last time we met we had another Ed Davey stunt, it was really bad, I don't know what happened to the prop budget but So my real job at the University of the Arts, we have whole courses on prop making and set design and honestly we could have done a better job on it, it was kind of practically a 2D hourglass, so if you hadn't.

So previously he made the clock because it was about time for Richy Sunak to show Johnson the door, oy Sunak, uh, there was a cannon to take out the clowns and so they came back, they basically ran out of puns . I've gone back in time and then it was an hourglass, but the problem was because I think it was said that time was up Ry Sunak or something like that, tell Richy that time was up, but it ended at a time when the grain, even sand, came out like this. slow like I said, time's up Trish um sounds great, it was a low quality accessory.

I mean, I think someone needs to make some donations to the Lib Dems just to support the quality of their accessory manufacturing. I've said it before and I'll say it again, all Ed Davy needs to do is launch the NIT CLE recreating Kly Ray Jepson's music video. I've never seen it and you've never seen it. I have never seen it. Do you know about this Peter? I haven't seen it. I don't know there was a music video for a young pop star called kly Jepson starring Tom Hanks and in 2015 Nick CLE filmed a shot for shot recreation hoping it would go viral and it cost around £8,000 and never released it , that's how bad it was wow yeah the song I'm sorry right no the song is um I really like you oh so the hope was that people would say I really like that Nick C would look at him walking by Serious and pretending.

Being Tom Han a thousand pretending to be a thousand is a lot of money in Liberal Democrat terms Pretty cheap yes, I think it's a complete bargain. I don't know how they managed to do it for 8,000. I think I've made worse political videos. for a lot more money than that, but of course I think the worst political video of all time is the video the Conservative party released yesterday about fearmongering about crime in London, which has the production values ​​of an Edwood film and includes a pen clip. New People Want People Station Chaos on the streets of London, but really a clip from Pen Station and then they tell it with some kind of weird footage of an office worker looking stressed instead of Penn Station.

I mean, honestly, it's probably the worst video of all time. I made it a whole podcast where I think it zooms out into space and then zooms back in. He has the voice of an American. I thought we're supposed to be patriotic in the Conservative party. I don't understand how it fits with the Bulldog he was. the best choice you remember we are not talking about t again we will come back we will come back remember yes, you have told about yes, yes, you take pictures of them, you take pictures, the only one, yes, uh, well, uh, right next door?

We will talk about the Manifesto. I think we'll come back and make terrible announcements another week so MPs go off for the Easter break but work will start on the party manifestos and we've had this question since how to win an election listener hello how to win team I was wondering what it was the process of preparing a Manifesto in your political parties who writes it and who approves it there I love the podcast Charlie that's Charlie there so uh manifestos who writes them who approves them when when Does this process begin? Is it happening already Danny?

Well I've been involved in some um and it varies a little bit um in the end the party leader will obviously have to be satisfied with the Manifesto from him there are a lot of fragments. Although you know it in every subject area and there are often, for example, in the Conservative party in 1992 there were massive changes to the press by the head of the Research Department, my predecessor, Andrew Lansley, uh, in a section on transport. um, which the transportation secretary hadn't accepted and um, they were still getting called on this kind of thing two or three years later, the reason that matters is because I think less about the outcome of the election than I do about the conduct of the government.

One of the things that is important to understand about politicians is that they try to do what they say they are going to do. This is the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. And so it's very important what they say they're going to do because they join a position that they then try to implement, you know, which is the reason why when we talked before Peter intervened in this matter of the contracts of zero hours and try to word correctly at this point, you are trying to save them, I think Peter from pushing themselves into a position that they cannot implement later and then they will get into a very situation or they will not be able to defend in an election campaign, as well which you already know, but I think it's less of that than what will actually end up happening. in office, so the answer is that everyone will have a role, usually there will be and the Conservative Manifesto 97 case was written by a guy called Norman Blackwell, uh, I was the head of the Prime Minister's policy unit.

I was the director of the Conservative Research Department which I was involved in because I was thought to be good at writing, as was David Willits who was a Conservative minister. You also know a conservative historian author, to make sure the document was made. some kind of sense as a theme as a narrative um and but a lot of people contributed at the policy level um and at the policy level in each of their individual areas, so there's a lot of work that goes on in the For approval of the manifesto you have to start quite early to ensure that happens and, you know, I've been involved in some political documents where that turned into a nightmare, with people arguing about whether someone was lost. the deadline and if they could, you know if Ian Duncan Smith could include something about the territorial army because someone else said he should have submitted it the day before yesterday and he didn't, you know that kind of SP defeat takes Happ a remarkable amount of time, so a Manifesto is basically three different documents in one.

The first is that it is a speech for voters to try to win their support and for that you need a kind of narrative integrity that fits your campaign. narrative and some kind of political banner that the main things that symbolize that story that you are trying to tell are also a way of holding together a coalition of supporters within your party, at the level of your shadow cabinet, your cabinet, but also inside you. you know all the different stakeholders, you know the Conservative friends of science or the Labor friends of, you know, agriculture or whatever, all these people who have images and ideas and want to feel heard and you can't get that. everyone's demands in the manifesto, but you can give people a sense of belonging and identity and a connection to your agenda that helps you mobilize a campaign force, but also Stanny has mentioned a government program if you assume that you will lose the elections. it's very much not a program for government and that matters a little less for most of the liberal democrat manifestos that have existed, it's not really a program for government, it's just the other two things, that's why lial democrat manifestos they tend to be really really long, including so many thousands of policies, um, but you also have to recognize that when you put out so many things, as Peter says, you're creating lines of attack and fodder for your opponents, um, I saw something yesterday from the Conservative party, I think in you know, oh, the Labor parties made 373 announcements on energy policy and they amount to £93 million, you're creating attack material and so increasingly parties are reducing their manifestos to improve narrative integrity, but also to reduce the risk that The downside to this is that it limits its ability to be a truly established government program, assuming it ever gets there.

The first electoral Manifesto that I had to fight with and that I have the responsibility of presenting was in 1987, it was our first point of recovery from the longest suicide note in history of 1983, in fact, simply a fool crammed with votes from Michael F. Tony Ben losing policies, so I took a different approach to these policy statements and documents. When I arrived at Labor party headquarters I had no choice. but to take all the sort of political outputs from the policy department and they were the defenders of the holy grail of the Labor Party, but I said well as Director of Communications, although I had responsibility for how they were presented on the page and I would put the policy print everything the material on one edge of the page I created a big white margin on the other side and in the white margin I put phrases taken from politics in the way I chose because I was the communications director, individual sentences that were my summary of what I thought that the Labor party was saying or rather should be saying and it was the best gloss I could put on that big white margin with most of the handwriting squeezed in at the other end of the page, the truth is that Polly It's true, manifestos both of campaign documents and government documents.

In my kind of experience with Blair Brown, Brown tended to see manifestos as campaign documents and his goal was to draw dividing lines between you and your opponents and your favorite dividing line, which actually worked very well. for him until 2010 it was investment versus cuts to our investment versus conservative cars, the problem is that in 2010 we ran out of money after the global financial crisis so it made investment difficult and the Tes were actually making a virtue of the cuts, huh. Cameron and Osborne and on one level it probably worked well for them, they were more in tune with what voters felt, on the other hand some would say it contributed to them achieving just a hung parliament rather than a majority.

I'm not sure. I'm sure Blair, on the other hand, would like to see the Manifesto as a kind of visionary future, this is what we are going to do with the country and the interesting thing about Blair is that in 1997 he started with his vision of this is what what we want to do for the country, everything is going to improve as we know it was like that, um uh and uh, but it was a fairly safe first version of the future by the time it arrived in 2001, you already had a little more of the flavor of the reform. uh, Blair, when you got to 2005, you knew it was in radical flux.

He had gone from calm in 1997 to definitely more radical when he arrived in 2005, probably because he knew the last word from him. last kind of roll of the dice before Gordon took over, but if you think about Thatcher too, she was exactly the same, she was quite reserved, all she wanted to do in 1979 was win, yeah, you got the feeling she was going to happen. be different under Thatcher, but you didn't know how when she was in her post-Forkland mode in 1983, she was firing on more cylinders by the time she got to 1987, she was like full speed ahead, uh, that and then of course she famously became explode, but what I mean is that the longer a leader is in office, the more confident he is, the bolder he becomes, the more radical his manifestos become and that happened both in the case of Blair and in the case of that right and so on. and that's very interesting, I think that's right, and in the case of Margaret Thater and Tony Bear, you can probably see what that journey would be, where being bold would take them, what your opinion is on that with Kir Starma, where if she won . a large majority in the next elections, which is not certain, but it is not impossible either.

Therefore, he gets more than one mandate and becomes bolder as he progresses. What does that mean? What is boldness for K Dharma? I know. What audacity was for Tony Blair. The audacity was different for G, but what I mean is that you didn't really see the audacity of Tony Blair until you went through a couple of elections. I think a new leader is focused in the first instance. on one thing above all and that is winning, so what do we know about who is working on the Labor Manifesto? Oh, that's very clear, the guy holding the pen is a bright young man called RAV Athell, former Treasury official, I hope not.

He didn't bother Sharon Graham too much about joining the union, uh, and she's O, he's supervised by the head of policy, who's a very interesting guy named Steuart Inham and he's a formeracademic, very hard-working, very tenacious. I would say that he was in the Realistic Thinking of the School of Work, but very ambitious. He is the chief architect of Starmer's five missions and he is very ambitious about what he wants a Labor party or a Labor government to achieve, but I would say both are really important to him. It is very important for other political officials, one is that he really knows the mind of his leader, he is very close to Starm when you talk to Shingham, you know that you are also talking to Starma and secondly, he learned from the

mistake

that Kza May made in 2017. she did not speak or include her cabinet in the drafting of that Manifesto.

What was left of his two Chiefs of Staff, the cabinet didn't actually see the manifesto until they were put on a bus and presented with a copy of it, uh, an hour. far from its actual launch at the beginning of the campaign to the public no, it is not good and I think Ingam is not going to make that mistake, he is talking all the time to members of the shadow cabinet and that is the test of a political official , can? with your top politicians help them get over the sort of labyrinthine nature of policy making and tell them how to avoid the landmines they are going to encounter, for that you need a very good relationship with your top politicians, that's not how Theresa May approached it in 2017. and yet Dany, uh, Richy Sunak, has Will Tanner working on his Manifesto, who helped like the 2017 Manifesto for Theresa May, yeah, I mean, he was the star's boss, certainly involved, though , although you don't know, it wasn't the crucial writer, but I think it was all a big mistake um and you know my own experience was exactly as Peter uh describes it, you have to work very closely with members of what in my case was the shadow cabinet, um mainly because Norman Blackwell looked after the cabinet in '97, but in 2001 you have to work very closely with members of the shadow cabinet to ensure that they are on board on what are often quite small issues that you You know, even at the policy unit level of a party out of power, you may not even know about one thing.

What's important to understand is how small the policy-making group is for a party that is not in office, so in fact, you know the research facilities are very distributed throughout the party, there many members of the shadow cabinet will have most of the knowledge. of what the problems are, especially when you're out of office, it's really dangerous to try to do that, but I think in office, you know, Theresa showed that taking people by surprise in politics is often a bad idea, so Will Tanner . who are Rich, the next deputy chief of staff, and James Nation, the deputy head of policy unit number 10, are writing the Conservative Manifesto, assuming there is a huge team, thousands of people working on a lib Manifesto product, Well, you have to remember that there is a difference. between writing, you know, not holding the pen these days, usually tapping on a keyboard, but and the authorship of the manifesto, and you know in the Liberal Democrats there is the advantage of a very extensive Democratic political process.

Now in many ways it's not an advantage, but at least it means that there's no way you can do the trick on the bus with a Manifesto that way there's a federal policy committee, there's a Manifesto working group that It is chaired by Dick Nuie, who is a fellow, but also Ed Davy. It's very involved but it's a very open process, it makes it almost impossible for the Lib Dems to announce anything new during a general election, but really because of the way they're campaigning and their kind of ground war. concentrate on a relatively discrete number of seats, it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter, it's just gaining momentum, but there is also a risk for the Liberal Democrat party, just as the Labor party has the union saying "we".

We are part of the process and we want these things to be the leader of the Lib Dems because a lot of things are hanging around your neck from motions passed at conference and the extent to which you accept them, includes them, does not include you. I tried to abolish tuition fees as a policy But finally in 2010 the manifesto said we will abolish tuition fees and it is strange that the leader goes into an election with a big promise in a Manifesto that I personally did not agree with because his party said that's what they wanted, yeah, I mean that's the downside of having a democratic process.

Actually, I don't think it's very useful to mobilize people to donate and stay active, it's to feel that the party belongs to them. the party should not belong to its members the party should belong to the voters and the country so overall I think it's a really unhealthy way to run a political party. I think in an election campaign you have to realize that the media has very little interest in the manifesto, I mean almost zero interest until they can find something in it that they can detonate, I mean they want to find something that they can use as a weapon against the party, publish the manifesto and the truth is that the Conservatives The party has two advantages: it has a Conservative research department that has been trained and honed over many decades in checking Labor Party documents to find things that can be detonated and they have a huge milieu of right-leaning Conservative support on their side who were very happy to amplify and multiply and go to war against these things that they want to detonate and the Labor parties found this again and again and, having learned from experience , decided not to leave unexploded ordnance scattered around their Manifesto for the Conservative Research Department. to find and Danny is here sitting here, a great example of someone who is well trained in finding undetonated ordinances in workplace politics and finally, I think it's actually a pretty ACC accredited profession, isn't it?

Because otherwise, because if the ordinance doesn't blow up, you really don't want it to blow up under the country, so, no, I mean, that's seriously, no, seriously, there's a role to try to solve, already You know, if you were to ask me one of the reasons I go into politics is to prevent things from happening that I think were stupid ideas and that's a very respectable position, especially for someone who is a conservative with a small or large seat, so I think the critical thing about manifestos is that parties then try to implement them and they can end up in a lot of trouble for doing that and that is the lesson of tuition fees, uh, position, the lesson of various conservative promises, I think silly, about the tax rates, um, which you know in particular. tax rates and freezing particular tax rates that have been repeated and then affected by changing economic circumstances, terrible, terrible habit I have seen in the Labor party of leaving things as they are.

Make it vague, just put it in the manifest, don't specify it in any way. and it will go unnoticed during a campaign and then of course they dig it up and detonate it in front of you and you think, oh God, if only I had fixed this before the campaign started, if only I had fixed these problems, if only would have sort of confronted people and said, look realistically, what are we really proposing here? if it survives and gets in and you end up in government it's even worse uh and then it explodes on the other side now uh let's take some of your questions again John WhatsApp this message on Hello I would be interested to know your opinion on If there is any scope for random selection of candidates or even for MPS, this is probably best aimed at Peter initially as he has some experience of how this actually happens in practice and is successful.

I'm referring to the casting of Stuart Drummond, also known as Hangus the Monkey. P seems excited to be reminded again that this is a man dressed as the soccer ball M, the mascot of the harle pool soccer club who ran to become mayor of harleypool in 2002, never thought for a second that he would win and He then defeated the Labor party. in your you haven't said how he was dressed oh hangust the monkey monkey monkey monkey so he wore it every week at home at har bu United away games this monkey costume um and he was famous for it, it was a big city Me I imagine he's a very, very nice guy, with no interest in politics or running city affairs, and thought it would be a good joke if he ran for directly elected mayor of Harley Paul, um, like monkey hangers. and then the joke was on us because He won, but then He kept winning, right?

He held up well that night. I mean, he was absolutely heartbroken about this because it was an occasion where we had found a really, really good job candidate. He was a local businessman, a real city. Leo Gillan family and he would have been a great mayor and he was defeated by a monkey how good was the monkey so for the most part he wasn't very good we kept getting elected no what happened was the really effective CEO of The city, uh, quit, moved on, didn't want to keep up with this nonsense, but the stud thing, he was very nice and very, very well-intentioned, but effective, but what's up with this idea of ​​Danny's to select random people like jewelry service? to be told why you're going to be an MP for the next five years, yeah, look, I mean, it's actually called classification, this idea and you actually know a theory of democracy that would be better to do to get more diversity. sorting is called ha ha choose choose choose Representatives very effectively, um, you.

Obviously to get pure randomness you would have to make it mandatory for people to accept this position and you would get a very, very wide variance, so my opinion is that the average would be lower than what you would get if you allowed people to search a position properly, so there are certain disadvantages if people seek a position, you get less diversity, you also get more people who seem, you know, to take ambitious care of themselves, both good and bad. way, but I would say that in general, uh, the selection would do worse than the people who apply for it.

I have Le a new word poppy, but do you think it's a good idea if you forgot my name? What did I just say poppy poppy poy? I don't know who she is, but our dog, that's my dog's name too. Your dog's name is Poly. What do you think of Stion? Well, as a dog name. I don't want to provoke Peter because we're almost out of time. but actually K Starma has been quite interesting, uh, or not, it was Sue Gray talking about the role of citizen juries as part of our democratic infrastructure, hundred jury assemblies, there is a different way and my opinion is that this classification attracts to people by lottery. participating in democratic processes has a really important role to play in solving big problems is much better than the referendum was used in Ireland in the run-up to the abortion referendum to create a much more participatory structured process than was being done raising people there There is a lot of innovation in city governance around having a permanent citizen jury.

My opinion is that representative democracy is also needed, but the two together can work effectively to balance. It didn't go so well more recently in Ireland, where citizens' assemblies went this way and that way. The whole Irish public did another good one, let's not go to bed while the citizens' assemblies bring back the end of how to win the election Peter Madison cop McKenzie Daniel figin I'm Matt Jolly in next week's episode we'll bring you details of how You can come see us live this is how you win an election