Everyone wants to feel good about themself.

Our inner narrative is driven by this imperative. No-one wants to hate. We hate when we're empty.

We need to find a scapegoat that explains why we're not doing as well as we wish we were.

In the UK this week there have been shocking scenes of anti-immigration riots. On the surface it looks like racism. Actually there's a bigger problem.

This is about hopelessness and groups of people being manipulated.

Politicians and Social Media Influencers are creating a narrative that serves their agendas. There are sections of society that feel like failures. And they are being given a narrative that creates a scapegoat.

This is nothing new.

It's been the story of human civilisation for years. This issue is too big and complex for us to really do justice to. But it is a dynamic that threatens every team.

Division.

I got together Michael Ward, Clark Ray and Michele to try and make sense of the issues we've been seeing with the UK riots.

I was watching what was unfolding.

I'm, not a big news reader, but you get when something is

going down, which is quite big.

And for me, it's really a sign of division.

There's certain people who manipulate situations like Nigel Farage the one

who calls himself tommy robinson, andrew tate manipulating people who

they're stoking their primal fears And basically this is about division.

The podcast is called the unified team and division is the enemy of the unified team.

The biggest question I get if I'm interviewed on a podcast or talking

to someone is they say, can you just keep it to business relationships?

You can't, because people are people, you can't separate the person and

the way that they think about their personal relationships plays into how

they're business relationships play out.

So I thought it would be interesting, because this is

something that's very public.

It's something that we are able to look at but learn the principles behind it.

And I think all of us are able to think of all of us have been

involved in solving problems.

And when you have to solve a problem, the solution comes

at a higher level of thinking.

And so you have to think outside of the context.

Clarke has something called the 10th man, which he advocates, which is someone

who questions and prevents the group.

I'm being very careful not to say devil's advocate.

No, you're dead right.

It is

that I believe even in the Israeli intelligence community where

the idea originated, they also called it the the devil's advocate department.

Yes, there are similarities, but over the years, the idea, the

concept has changed somewhat.

I don't know if you guys reacted the same to this situation as I did.

But when I saw it happening, it had a painful sinking inevitability

about the whole situation.

As you saw this thing unfolded.

It was just clear that this was not going to clear itself up very quickly and it

was going to head down a particular road.

One of the things having worked in manufacturing for more than

20 years dealing with morale on the shop floor with unions.

battling with management for improved circumstances and so on

with dissatisfied groups of workers and all sorts of things that happen

as we know in the industrial arena.

There are some similarities between what was going on the streets and what

I've seen so often in, in factories.

I was at a factory in Coventry four or five years ago where they were trying

to move part of the factory, but it was crossing over all sorts of, sensibilities,

amongst certain groups of workers.

And there was all sorts of problems.

A lot of workers were causing some difficulties with the changeover.

And they asked me to go in and try and bring some order to this situation.

And one of the interesting things I found about it was that the

bosses, the management, had certain assumptions that they made about why

all these problems were happening.

If only we could do this, and this, it would all go away.

And this whole idea that Rob's just mentioned about the tenth man.

Is that he challenges those assumptions because an assumption is just based

on a set of beliefs that you guys as lecturers and psychologists will know

that I have no basis in reality if they just guesses and sometimes we would

get lucky and we guess right and other times it goes catastrophically wrong.

There were certain assumptions that were being made about these

things that were taking place.

What is it now over a week ago in places like Rotherham and Sunderland

that couldn't be wider of the mark.

I wrote a post yesterday on Substack.

about the fact that the seeds of this discontent in places like Rotherham,

Middlesbrough, Sunderland, was sown 40 odd years ago, when all the mines

were closed, and Thatcher did a walk across the wasteland, and talks

about moaning minis in the mining industry and that sort of thing.

This is a part of the country that's been pushed into

irrelevance for years, for decades.

And I do occasionally rail against the, this holier than thou attitude

that certain management and leadership types have towards these people.

Because, I try to challenge the ideas of leaders when they assume

that these working class people have got nothing to say for themselves.

They're uneducated and so they don't know the world around them.

And of course they do.

They may not interpret it very well, they may not express it very well,

and sometimes they can get hijacked by the agendas of people with some

very seriously dark vested interests.

But they're unhappy for a reason and these things need to be looked into.

And as I say, in fact, as I said in my post yesterday, get off

your arses, get from behind your desk and go and have a look.

You cannot know the answer sitting in your little desk in Whitehall.

We've had other discussions on, about men being left behind and

the struggles certain men have, and I think this is an outcome of those

kind of changes that when we change, we have to take care of everyone.

Nobody goes out and hates because they're happy.

They hate because they're feeling disenfranchised.

Some deep loss, some deep futility.

And there is a whole section of often we try to make change and we make

knee jerk changes, and then we don't consider the people that are losing out.

It's key that we bring everyone along and give everyone a voice.

I think there are whole sections of society that The gap between

the haves and the have nots are falling further and further behind.

And there's a lack of education, there's a lack of, understanding.

And there's a certain section of, society that is falling

further and further behind.

Yeah, but, Rob, this wasn't the

case 30, 40, 50 years ago.

There were many poor people that didn't go around kicking other people's doors in.

So there's clearly some other ingredients in the mix at the moment.

You mentioned when you spoke about having this conversation that you wanted to

talk about things like herd mentality, groupthink is something that I've always

pushed against because to me, the idea that you're in the group that knows best

is anathema to me, the minute you join any group, you're wrong, just by virtue

of the fact that you've joined the group, because no group can have all the answers.

Otherwise, we'd all be in it.

And the problem is, when you, I watched some clips of people walking

down the street kicking doors.

And I just thought no sane person would do that.

The people doing those things are not acting the way they ordinarily would under

normal circumstances and the psychology.

You will know better than me, Michael, about this.

The psychology of a person, we've mentioned before the

Stanford prison experiments.

You put a person in a particular set of circumstances.

I know from my own experience in the military, you put somebody in

a given set of circumstances and their personality changes completely.

And that can be manipulated, and so with the rise of the internet and Twitter

and all this stuff, it's so easy now to whip people up into a feeding frenzy.

And this whole idea that I've been banging on about for probably 10

years now, about the 10th man, is to me the only answer is to get somebody

in the room that has no agenda.

Socrates, I think, said it, Thousands of years ago, when he echoed the words

of the the Pythagoreans, that, anybody that offers any advice to government

should have no property, own no money, have no bank account, because you can't

then be bribed or coerced to do anything.

And that's the problem.

Everybody has an agenda to push these days.

And funnily enough, I'm in the middle of trying to put this book together.

It's a bloody nightmare.

It's just getting bigger and bigger.

But the idea at the moment is that I'm trying to establish in the moment is that

the heuristics, the rules of thumb that we apply to our framework, our belief system.

And, the fact that we live in a world now where all truth is relative makes

it next to impossible to say to somebody whether something is right or wrong.

Even though the image of somebody kicking somebody else's door in.

It's clearly wrong, but as the saying goes today, that's

your truth, it's not my truth.

How do you overcome this group mentality when everybody's swept along

by this tide of we're in the right?

And clearly, in the cold light of day, they look at their actions

and must see that they're not.

I'm sure they absolutely do, but my feeling is that we're

probably reaping the reward for the last 40 years, to be blunt, really.

Do people know the Bruce Springsteen song, The River, at all?

Yeah.

Okay.

Bruce Springsteen, he's obviously got this image as this blue collar worker.

In fact, he's probably never looked at a spanner in his life.

But who am I to speak, as Michele will tell you.

But about late 70s, maybe 78, 79, 80, his brother in law was a blue

collar worker, and he got laid off.

And Bruce Springsteen did this song called The River, and it's about young

kids growing up together, the guy and his girlfriend, he gets her pregnant,

they get married at 19, he's got a job in construction, 2021, boom, the job's gone.

And he lives in the valley, and you work for the same place, but it's gone.

And it ain't coming back.

And I think those people have had 40 years of it not coming back, not just in this

country, but in America, particularly in America, particularly in the Midwest.

And I think there's just 40 years of hopelessness, fueling a kind of, I

don't understand the world, the liberal intelligentsia, the elite, whoever they

are, don't understand me, they don't care.

I think it comes out with, you need somebody to blame.

So it's somebody different to yourself.

It's some poor guy with a different colored skin and

then you go kicking doors.

And the next day you probably do feel dreadful about it, but you've

got a sense of hopelessness.

I know Rotherham, I know Middlesbrough, they are desperate places.

I'm not saying that to be rude to the people.

Middlesbrough always was a desperate place.

It was always the grimmest place up there.

People used to drink in Middlesbrough for oblivion.

The way the Gregorians drank, you drank for oblivion, it was unbelievable.

Since the sort of late 70s, early 80s, obviously the

Thatcher years made a difference.

It clearly changed the landscape dramatically.

However, since then, neither the Conservative nor the Labour

governments have been able to do anything to redress that balance.

I remember seeing a few months ago, It might have been last year, actually.

A woman that was arrested for killing her husband.

They were in the middle of an argument.

It was over something ridiculous, like what cereals, whether he'd

eaten the cereals or something.

She killed him, stabbed him to death.

Now she clearly didn't kill him because of the cereals that he ate.

Absolutely, yeah.

There was a whole load of other stuff going on before that, and that was the

straw that broke the camel's back neck.

I wrote in the article yesterday that I consider the British and

the English specifically to be amongst the most civil, tolerant and

fair-minded people on the planet.

I joined the British Army at the age of 16.

And despite my my contempt for politicians of all stripes, I love this country.

And I love the habits and the traditions that, that we continue to cultivate.

I grew up in Birmingham where chicken tikka masala was as common as Korean

chips and kippers and, jollof rice, there were all sorts of people there,

and yet we were all, to my mind anyway, British, and this seems to be This idea

seems to be slowly getting eroded at the moment, because people are politicizing,

basic fundamental cultural issues.

In the post that I did yesterday, I put a picture towards the end that I made in

Canva, and it basically was two signposts.

One pointing that way to London, and the other one pointing that

way to all the poor people.

And basically that's how this country is since the times of the Normans, as

far as I can tell, the Normans never ventured much beyond, Essex maybe,

or a little bit further but anywhere from Birmingham and upwards, nobody

went, and money never goes that way.

You just said that Middlesbrough is desperate.

But places like Coventry and Derby, and all the towns in between, Stoke on Trent

and all Crewe and all those places.

are desperate.

They've been neglected for such a long time because what

politician ever goes there?

The money's all coming into the City of London.

It's getting passed around Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament and all

the people that have got these very big houses with moats around them.

And as far as they're concerned, the rest of the country is just

to feed the City of London.

It

amuses me when I go up the M1 and shortly after leaving near the M25

there's a sign which says to the north.

Yeah.

With a skull and crossbones.

Yeah.

Michele, where are you from if you don't mind me asking that?

Michael and I lived in Sheffield for a long time so of

course we knew Rotherham very well.

Yeah.

I mean at the time when the steel industry went, I mean I

remember going through the Don Valley and seeing all the furnaces lit up.

And then that all went, and then you were left with just special steels.

They call them little mestas, little special steel companies, and that changed.

So it's a big difference for me to live in the south of England

there's a definite change of attitude as you go down south

and look, we've all been to London and Hampshire and places like that.

They're lovely.

The people are lovely.

But outta sight, outta mind.

My wife's a few years younger than me and we had a conversation a

couple of days ago about the miners.

I'd written this article about the minor strikes and so on, and

growing up in the seventies, in the three day week and power cuts.

it was fairly common to get a knock on the door at sort of seven o'clock at

night and it would be miners or their wives from places like Coventry and

Derby and from all around Birmingham.

Birmingham exists because it was the epicenter of all these places that

were sending coal in to provide for the foundries and the furnaces and yet all

that's gone so we now have the shell.

The skeleton of an infrastructure that no longer exists and Britain has become this

service oriented country that is all about fake money, pretend money and yet fake

money doesn't buy the dinner for the kids.

And, there are a lot of people in, this is half of the country.

Who have been hanging on year after year and whilst there is a great value

to be have had from bringing immigrants into this country, let's face it, we

are a country built on immigration.

We're all immigrants.

From the Saxons all the way through the Vikings and so on up to today, all

of my friends growing up in Birmingham were of different nationality.

My best friend was Iranian and all of my friends were either Irish or West Indian.

So clearly this is a country built on immigration.

However, when people are going without and then they see people from another

country being put into hotels, whether you agree with that or not, you can

understand why they might be a little bit annoyed, especially when they're

only seeing what's going on the surface.

One of the conversations that I often have in factories when we're

talking to disenfranchised workers.

Was that they had it in their mind that if they were put in

charge, it would all change.

And I always used to say, okay, what would you do?

How would you change things?

Because I guarantee within a fortnight, you'd be running it

exactly the same way as them.

Because you only have limited resources, and you have the

same brain capacity as them.

So clearly you can't see everything that's going on behind the scenes.

However, you need to have that conversation.

And that's not something that's been happening for a long time.

Also, I think something else happened with, when you said

about Thatcher kicking things off, we basically changed from

Keynesian politics to neoliberalism.

And that's a huge sea change.

That's a huge sea change.

And I would argue that, there's obviously lots of factors to do that have caused

the present circumstance, but I would argue that neoliberalism is probably

the single greatest factor in our lives.

And yet most people have never heard of it or couldn't particularly define it.

And I'll give you my rough definition because I'm no economist.

My definition basically is that neoliberalism is when the government

acts in concert with the markets.

Basically, the whole point of capitalism isn't immoral, but it's amoral.

It's neither moral nor immoral.

It's just a more capital.

It's just use money to make more money to make more money.

And that's fine.

That's fine.

But if you want any kind of normal society, unless you just want one

AI robot to end up all the wealth in the world, because that's

where it would go in the end.

a government needs to decide, really decide how capitalism

should work and practice, where the money should go, what should be

allowed, what shouldn't be allowed.

Now that's not been happening for a long time under Labour governments

as well as conservative ones.

I think.

There's a point I often make in these sort of conversations in factories,

because a factory to me is a little microcosm of the way the country is run.

The people in charge, they think they know best and they

tell everybody else what to do.

One of the things I always say is, get out from behind your desk, go and have

a look, talk to the people that know.

Ask them what they need, and then get out of their way while they fix it.

Because you don't know.

You can't do what they do.

And, funnily enough, you mentioned that about neoliberalism.

I have a really good friend who is a lecturer at the London School

of Economics, and she wrote a book last year called Late Soviet

Britain, which I found fascinating.

We had a conversation about it a couple of weeks ago.

Because it sounded it's a strange title.

Britain couldn't be further from a Soviet model.

She was talking about the fact that the similarities between the two are

that Both the Soviets and historically British governments have decided

that they know what's best for the people that live in the country.

And rather than treating them as humans, who evolve and change and have

differences of opinion and so on, they try to fit people into these processes,

as you said, about the financial models that they impose upon the country.

As if everybody would just go along with it, because, that's

what we do, we're just robots.

And of course, the end result of all of these ideas are that there

are places where money tends to congregate, as in the City of London,

and other places where there's none.

And how do you redress that balance?

Because you can't just pump money into a place that is now rotting from the inside.

One of the things that Mrs.

Thatcher did, which was very clever, was she abolished a lot of the county

councils, because most of them were labour, and a lot of them would go

against some of the reforms that she wanted to impose, so by getting rid of

them, evolved into the cities, which were predominantly capitalist in nature.

So a lot of these things, as you said right at the beginning, Michael, we're

now, reaping the whirlwind from some of the decisions that have been made.

As I said in this article yesterday, there are no easy answers.

Anybody that says, these are right wing fascists and we need to impose

this absolutely, there are some people that have got some really strange

ideas about the nature of this country.

They are a minority that the real problems will involve getting down to grassroots

and having some serious conversations about how the country is run at a

local level, and those conversations are going to involve some hard truths,

I think, both for the people involved and for the government as a whole in

Westminster, because they have been shamefully negligent in the way they've

dealt with the rest of the country.

As Michele says, the North, there ought to be a sign under

that says, here be dragons.

There used to be, there

used to be a sign, I can remember hitching in the early 70s and as you

went out in London I can't remember where it was, Edgware or somewhere,

we got on the motorway and there was a sign that said, it said Aylesbury and

the north, and Aylesbury was 23 miles up it, so it was the north, it was

a vast brooding territory, up there.

Where the Ninth Legion had gone into the mists and never come back.

There's so many differences.

There's a North Side difference.

There's a neoliberalism versus Keynesian.

There's, there are just so many differences, I'm just

not sure we can bridge them.

I'm massively optimistic.

I find myself pathologically positive about the future.

And, I said to my wife, as we were watching some of these scenes unfold,

I may be enormously misguided, but I said, look I'd love somebody to

say, Clark, go and talk to them.

I

would happily.

So I'd love to as well, but it's not going to happen.

And if we did, would anybody listen to us, Clark?

When we were talking about this, my wife, for a short while,

worked in the same factory as me.

She's a quality inspector so she knew some of the issues that we

were facing at this great big factory in Coventry, enormous place.

And I said there was a time when I was trying to instill some

changes, but they saw me as a tool of the management, because I've

been sent there to fix this issue.

So I was neither one nor the other.

I was stuck between the devil and the deep.

There was a point, this factory made enormous vehicles big dumper trucks,

10 ton dumper trucks that carry stuff around quarries and stuff, and there was

a point at which somebody wanted to move one of these trucks, and I just said,

Hold on, these guys haven't finished.

And they were at the point of running me over with this great big truck.

They were threatening to, they were trying to intimidate me.

And I said, look, if you push ahead of this guy, then that

will have a knock on effect.

Please, just trust me.

It took months and months.

But over a period of time, they started to realize that I had neither

interest in the management, nor in the shareholders, nor in anything else other

than just getting this thing functioning.

And it takes time to get that sort of trust.

And you have to prove that you can be trusted by the actions that you take.

Unfortunately, every politician that has ever stood up in any of the cities of the

North and given lip service to the help that they want it's never materialized.

Nothing's ever come of it, and so how can you expect these people to trust anybody?

And, all that happens is that the police have been beating them with

sticks and calling them fascists.

I saw an old guy, on camera, I think it was Sky News, and he said I have no

opinions either way about this stuff.

He said, but I'm part of this community, I feel I need to support them.

And witness What's going on?

And that's really what most people are doing.

They're just there to be a part of it and to voice their concern.

But somebody needs to actually physically do something.

Where's Mr.

Starmer at the moment?

I believe he's on holiday, is that right?

I don't know, and I'm not a huge fan anyway but I'd be very

surprised, he's not a risk taker, that's for sure, he's setting himself

out to be a safe pair of hands, and I can understand that but most politicians,

in fact all politicians these days, come up through the Westminster circle.

And their world is Westminster, not anywhere else.

It used to be, it used to be that the Labour MPs would have kind of trade

union experience, at least they'd have been, they'd have worked in the shop

floor, they'd have done something.

The Tories were considered to be people with business experience, usually

because they had family companies.

We're usually appallingly wrong, but that's another story anyway.

But even that limited experience, or maybe both of them were in the

military perhaps, but that's gone now.

Paddy Ashton was unemployed when he became an MP.

He'd been in the SBS, a special boat squadron.

He'd been out there doing stuff.

There's no ifs and buts, but that type of person doesn't exist anymore.

You start as an intern in Capitol Hill or Westminster, and you go up

through the greasy pole, and your world is Capitol Hill or Westminster.

That's your world.

That's what you know.

You don't know factories.

If you take most people into factories, they're just totally lost.

It's oh my God, what's happening?

Not to you, Clark and not to me either, even though I can't

change a bloody light bulb.

It's familiar territory.

They're familiar people.

I know them.

But Westminster politicians don't know them, and I can't see that changing in

our country, in America, or really any other any other major country either.

I don't know.

That, that is an issue, isn't it, that most politicians are nowadays career

politicians, as you've just mentioned.

Politicians, yeah.

Yeah Paddy Ashdown was probably the only politician I've ever had any

Maybe John Major to a degree, but John

Major got better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Paddy Ashton was one of the only people that I ever listened

to when he spoke because you could just tell there was a sincerity.

I noticed you call it a bit special boat squadron as well.

Very good.

Not as special because they changed the name to special boat service.

But back in the day it was the squadron, wasn't it?

I'm being old fashioned there.

Yes, good man.

But he'd seen life and he understood what it meant to

to try to influence a group of people for the greater good.

And that to me is where the real world meets politics.

He had an insight into both worlds, which politicians today don't have.

And you can see that by some of the.

monumental cock ups that have been made recently.

And watching the conservative government, disappear up its own

backside over the last year or two has been astonishing to watch.

It's almost like they, they've been committed some sort of communal suicide.

Because you couldn't have scripted it better than the way and clearly

a part of this whole situation.

Has a political agenda.

It's funny that it just happened, and regardless of what your political

ideals are, we just want to see a government that helps the country

regardless of what they call themselves.

It doesn't matter, does it?

So it's no coincidence that as soon as Mr.

Starmer gets into power, this thing is

And it's just a shame that it was a test that the current government doesn't appear

to have passed, certainly not yet anyway.

And let's hope they get a better grip on it.

I'm really pleased that you're optimistic because

I'm not very optimistic.

, I can see this happening.

I've been working as a volunteer with the young men on the barge in

Portland Harbor for several months.

I've just been immersed in the local bad feeling.

I remember when I first started doing it, I was absolutely staggered

by posts put on Facebook sites.

It was unbelievably racist and horrific.

And I'm just immersed in that the whole time now.

I've talked to other volunteers.

And I've said, even my friends, I've stopped talking to

them about these young men.

Because they are so fixed in their ideas, I can't see them ever changing.

I don't know if you have any kids amongst us.

I've got a son and a daughter, both in their sort of late 20s.

And I look at my son and then compare him to his friends.

And the sort of the, because most of the people that work in factories

are young men, predominantly depending on the industry.

Some certain sectors are predominantly women, but in heavy engineering and that

sort of thing, you have a lot of men and some of these ideas spread like a virus.

One of the reasons I got into the educational side of manufacturing,

training, was because I felt that a lot of these young men had no role models.

When I grew up, my granddad was still alive, he'd been in the Second World War,

he always wore a shirt and tie if pushed, he would stand and have a fist fight,

but he would much rather have a pint with you he had some strong opinions, but they

were based on, as far as he was concerned, the real world of what it meant to be a

working class man in Birmingham, and those people were all up and down the country.

Who do these guys have now, these young guys?

And I would watch a shop floor of 100, 150 people trying to get the, these

products out of the door, trying to work together to accomplish a common goal.

And they were a simmering mess of all of these contradictory ideas about

women, gender, sex, foreigners, and all of these real knee jerk, simplistic

attitudes towards the rest of society.

And I don't know about you, Rob, Michael, but when I was a young lad,

Certainly going into the military, my opinions were corrected by a

whack around the back of the head.

It worked, there was a sense of fairness in everything.

Nowadays there's as you say, Michele, there's some horrific sentiments going

around amongst some of these young guys.

And, I am optimistic because this is a country that's been forged

through difficulties and hardships.

I had a conversation with somebody recently, I do a lot of writing on

LinkedIn, and I was talking to somebody about an article that I wanted to

write, but I didn't know whether it would be inflammatory or not.

And what I was going to say to them was, it was an open letter to the rest

of the world that, look, it may look like England's going up in flames.

We've been here before.

Proportionately, the English Civil War killed more people than any

other war that has ever taken place.

We killed something like 5 percent of our own population.

One of the idiosyncrasies of the national, British national character is that we are

pathologically polite with each other.

And people think it's quaint and cute and nice.

But the reason for that is that if we aren't, We have an overwhelming

tendency to kill the living daylights out of each other, with a zeal

that people would be shocked at.

You only have to go to any football match and people are knocking seven bells out

of each other on a consistent basis.

And then they're all back at work on a Monday morning

drinking their tea together.

So there, there is a part of our character that tends toward being

somewhat belligerent and pugilistic.

However, in spite of all of these things, it's a beautiful place.

The British character to me it's a unique thing in the world and far be it for me to

say I'm proud of being British but I am so glad that I grew up in this country with

some of the ideas that we have about how we should live and look after each other.

One of the Afghan guys I was talking to yesterday off

the barge said, after the end of our conversation, I love the UK!

I thought, I hope it treats you well.

Michael, you might know something about this and I'm

interested to get your thoughts on this because my mum was a psychoanalyst.

When I was growing up she was batty as a fruitcake.

She was sorry?

My mum, my mother, she was mad as a box of frogs.

As so many of you are, in my humble opinion.

Go with the territory.

I'm not a psychologist any longer, by the way.

And I never liked psychologists but anyway.

But she was, enormous fan of Jung, Carl Jung, as so

many people are these days.

And in conversations with her I got to learn a little bit about Alfred

Adler, who had a very different view of how things like trauma and the things

that are supposed to affect the way we are how they manifest in the world.

I liked his approach, although I'm no psychologist and I certainly

wouldn't try to, Delve into it.

I just find that some of the ideas that are prevalent today that we

are basically the sum of all the bad things that ever happened to

us is a little bit detrimental.

I think, as a national character is going through something of a little bit

of a self loathing period at the moment.

We don't like ourselves very much because of all the terrible things

we did as part of our colonial past, all the things the influences

we had on the rest of the world.

And we seem to have this distaste for our past, which I personally

find puzzling because we've come out the other side of it.

That to me is the key to dealing with any trauma, that you come out of

it the other side, a better person.

which is something that seems that Alfred Adler seemed to propose that it's not

so much the thing that happened, but how you deal with the thing that happened

that makes you a better or worse person.

So I'm positive, Michele, because I think we'll be better for it.

The influx of immigrants that have come into this country has probably been

greater than we would ordinarily be able to withstand, but we will withstand it.

They will be assimilated into the country.

They will become British, and we will be a better nation for it, I'm sure.

Hopefully.

not at the cost of our feelings of how we feel about ourselves.

I think that's one of the sad parts of all this, that we, we don't look

very kindly upon ourselves at the moment, but that will change, I'm sure.

I agree, but this isn't a British problem.

It's a global problem.

Every country in Europe's got this problem.

America's got it too.

I'm optimistic, but for a different reason.

I think that, Basically, we're in a system that doesn't work.

And I think the problem is we've got a world that's too complex

for the narrative that we have.

So politicians give us a simplistic idea.

And people think that they can read a headline, the headline of the Sun

and they understand the issues, and the world has become so complex.

We're making snap decisions, based on headlines.

And we think that we know.

The riots is basically about a lack of trust and a lack of information,

or people perceiving that they have a lack of information.

And as you said, Clark, there are times when people are

running a factory, for example.

They're making decisions from a completely different basis

from someone on the shop floor.

And it's a matter of perspective.

In the same way that the rioters have a different

perspective from the politicians.

But I think where my optimism comes from is that we've had the same

basic model since, since the Greek.

Since the Greek Republic.

And there's that adversarial law adversarial politics.

So for me, I think the system is broken in where we're trying to vote on something

that most people don't understand.

And when you look at the political candidates, when it comes down to

Biden versus Trump, as it was a couple of weeks ago, that is the best in a

country of, what 340 million people.

That is the best candidates we can get.

And we're getting that because we've bound ourself.

Part of what we've seen is the problem of democracy and politics as they stand,

because politics isn't about truth.

Politics is about selling the narrative that gets you power.

We need something that works for the whole.

Not for individuals or individual parties.

Think we need a basis where we can unify as a nation.

And I think that what gives me, I think economically, politically,

socially, we're at the end of a system that isn't, that can't work,

as the world becomes more complex.

Yeah, Michael you just, I think when you were talking about the political

system in this country, I think you nailed it when you said that they are all

predominantly from the same pool these days the politicians in this country.

One of the problems that I have found In my work life, certainly working

for myself, banging this whole 10th mandrum, is that a certain mindset

will not accept the idea that there are alternative ways of doing things.

I have a brother in law who is a managing director of a company in Birmingham.

We've grown up together.

He knows what I'm all about.

And he said to me, about a year ago, just after I started working for myself,

he said, the problem that you have, Clark, is that the people that you need

to persuade of this idea you have about the tenth man, are the people that will

never employ you because you're basically telling them they're doing it wrong.

One of the problems with that is, and you just said that this is a

worldwide problem, which I agree with, but there are two exceptions

that come to mind immediately.

They give me cause for some positivity.

The first one is Japan, where, you know they operate as

part of a a global economy.

And yet so many of the problems that we have here in the West, they don't,

they have their own problems, of course, but they don't suffer from it.

And also from my time in the military.

I know it's changed in recent years, but from my time in the

military, it was a world unto itself.

The reason both of those entities stand out to me as different from

so much of what's wrong with the world at the moment, is that they

have a completely different culture.

The Japanese culture pushes back against so many of the mores of Western society.

And the British military has all these traditions and cultures that

completely Eradicate any room for some of the problems that are coming

in upon the world at the moment.

So much of the negativity just couldn't take place in a culture

that pushes pride and certain elitism and tradition and so on.

And I know those things are changing.

Just to go back very quickly to what I was talking about with regards to

leaders not taking me into their, some do of course, otherwise I'd starve.

Most don't.

And the reason is they say, yes, we have a problem with our culture in

this factory, in this organization, and we need to address that because the

culture is making certain behaviors, predominate and causing us problems.

And my answer is, you've got it the wrong way around.

You need to change the behaviours, then the culture will improve.

But whilst they're constantly trying to address the problem of

culture, nothing will ever change.

It's a self perpetuating organism.

You can't change something from the outside.

You have to get in and change the behaviours.

And that's something that they won't have.

As leaders, most people feel that they need to, and it becomes oppressive

this belief that they've got to change the culture, they've got to change the

way the people on the shop floor think before any behaviors will improve.

It doesn't work that way.

And they said how can you possibly think that you have the right

to change a person's behavior?

And I said look, if there's two doors into the factory and I close one, I

will automatically change people's behavior because they've got to

come in the only door that opens.

It doesn't have to be litigious.

It doesn't have to be oppressive.

You just change the environment and people's behavior changes.

And I think that's part of the thing that we need to do in this country.

We need to open up conversations about how we change the way we, for instance,

if you've got a working group of people together that have some sort of work in

knowledge of a particular community, and you discuss with them ways that you could

change the problems in the community, but in every group of people, you put,

for instance, some representative from the local mosque, a representative from

the, from let's say the local miners or the local factory workers, or all

the different people that have to work together, regardless of their different

differences in ideologies, they, as they get to know each other, those

differences start to become less and less.

As you get these people to work together, it will become clear,

I'm sure, that their similarities far outweigh their differences.

And then you can start to change the behavior, because in as

much as they're talking to each other, behavior will change.

But whilst we're trying to change the culture, we will never, ever succeed.

My first book was about culture change.

I used to run culture change programs and companies.

And I could face up to the most aggressive management director

who said, prove you can do this.

I'd just give them chapter and verse again and again.

They couldn't argue with it.

Couldn't argue with it.

What I just said,

does

that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

I could then do that in companies.

That huge effort, it destroyed my health.

It would take months and months.

It was really difficult to do.

That's therapeutic change, working it from behaviour to attitude to culture,

which is how culture gets formed.

Starts with behaviour, then attitude, then culture.

Short term, medium, long term.

Conscious, semi conscious, unconscious.

You can't deal with culture itself because it's unconscious.

But that, you can do that with a group of 250 people or 350 or 450.

But a country that's really hard.

It's easier with a commercial organization.

It's relatively easy to see what they're there for.

They're there to turn on power supplies or whatever.

With a country, that's hard.

The closest thing we've maybe got is perhaps the truth and

reconciliation process in South Africa.

I'm not sure how well that worked, but that's the only

example I can think of, really.

And as you say, Michael, even in an organisation of a few hundred people.

The enormous effort of will it takes to oppose the prevailing attitudes

is shattering for one or two people.

I worked with a with a consultant who was a little bit older than me

in one factory and it broke him.

And he ended up giving it up completely because the enormous pressure from top

to bottom throughout the organization stacked against him was too much for him.

So yeah you're quite right.

And you can see why somebody, for instance like Mr.

Trump has had the measure of success that he is had simply because he

seems to be impervious to a lot of the criticism, weighed against it.

And that in itself has gotta be a little bit of a defense, hasn't it, against

so much of the negative vibes that are directed against anybody trying to

make changes within an organization.

The interesting thing about Trump is his supporters don't care.

I felt that we had a watershed with Bill Clinton, Because Bill

Clinton blatantly dodged the draft.

He just did.

So did Bush for that matter, but Clinton blatantly did.

And the Americans, they said, the Americans, they just didn't mind.

40 years previously, our father's generation.

Oh, you're joking me?

Draft dodger?

I don't think so.

But they didn't care.

They just got to a point where they didn't care anymore.

And I don't know why.

Maybe it was like the reincarnation of Kennedy.

He looked bright and sparkling.

I don't know, somewhere along the way, maybe Also, we've lost organized religion

that gave people a sense of morality for whether for good or ill, I don't know,

but at least we've lost social structures.

We've lost so much, and, I struggle to see how we go forward.

There's also, there was a guy, Alvin Toffler's book, Culture Shock.

I was banging on to Michele about it a couple of days ago.

In 1970, a guy called Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Culture Shock,

and basically predicted the rate of change without a fast tide

strip our ability to deal with it.

Yes.

Boy, he wasn't wrong.

Going back to what you said at the beginning, Rob, if you actually tried to

understand the world now, you'd go crazy.

It's just, it's too complicated for anybody, wouldn't matter who you are.

It's just unbelievably complicated.

For a lot of people, instead of trying to up their game and raise their

level of understanding, it's simpler to just go with a Dominic Cummings.

It's similarly called make America great again, or it's the immigrants

fault, or whatever, it's simply just devolve into simplicities.

They're just bollocks, of course, it's easy.

Which then like the Kruger Dunning effect of the less people know, the more

they, the more confidence they have.

What comes to mind when I'm listening.

Politics and social media has become a game of talking and nobody's listening.

And I think a lot of these problems like with the rioters and problems

in factories or whatever come about because no one's listening.

There's certain people just don't get listened to.

And then I think what happens is you get someone like Farage

or Andrew Tate or Tommy Robinson who talk and yeah that's me.

Because they're the nearest voice that they have.

I think Trump understands that perfectly.

You just go straight to the lowest common denominator and plug in there.

Actually Farage is probably better at it.

Farage sounds like the nice guy in the pub.

He's obviously a nasty piece of work, but superficially he sounds your favourite

uncle, the guy that understands you.

There was a guy told me when Johnson got into power, there was a guy told me, he

was in a hairdresser's in Hebden Bridge, Happy Valley, where Happy Valley set.

And this girl, Tracy, she said, Oh, Boris, he's one of us.

He really understands us.

I don't think so, love.

I really don't think so.

The reality of Johnson, American privilege, blah, blah, blah,

Eton, Oxford, totally different to this lady in Hebden Bridge.

But she thought he's one of us.

But there's a thing, Michael, and I think probably this speaks

to the influence that people like Farage and Trump are able to

exert over the general population.

there was a boss that I worked with a couple of years ago, who

never moved outside of his office.

One of the things I said, look, the very first thing you need

to do is just go and walk about.

on the shop floor.

He said, Clark I have nothing in common with them.

They don't like me.

It's like I can feel them staring at me.

I said, for a start, when you're there, they're wondering why you're there.

What have they done wrong?

What are you going to do?

I said, let them just get used to you being there.

Walk about.

People will start to talk to you.

They'll ask you things.

Then you'll start to understand what's going on and you'll

feel comfortable there.

I said, but you've got to get on the ground and walk around and put up with it

for a little while you'll start to find that you can gain some common ground.

He said, but I've got nothing in common.

I said, no, because you're still sitting in your office.

You will have something in common because you're both trying to get

the bloody product out the door.

That's where Farage and Trump, I think, win.

Whether they can or not they give the impression of being able to understand

the difficulties and the challenges that the average person, encounters

on a day to day basis, because They get out and walk about, and there's

a saying in manufacturing and go to the gamba, go to the front line,

go to the shop, go and have a look, don't sit there and hypothesize on the

cultural ills that are causing this.

Maybe, race, gender, all of these things come into it, but that's not the problem.

The problem is the fact that you and them are alienated from each other.

You're at different ends of the spectrum.

Go and talk to them.

I genuinely believe that if we could just get some of these political dandies

out of their offices in Whitehall and stick them in the middle of Stockport or

South Shields or Sunderland or Sheffield or wherever, and make them stay there.

Don't let them back.

Actually.

Sounds

like a TV show.

There is a precedent for that.

Thatcher at one point sent Michael Heseltine to Liverpool to punish him.

And he went down an absolute bomb there.

He's still remembered with enormous affection.

Because the average person, that's all they want, isn't it?

They just want to be seen and heard.

I think, Heseltine was different because he had a lot of experience of

the real world and he did get stuck in.

He didn't try and pretend to be what he was.

And he obviously is a posh git.

He didn't try and pretend otherwise.

He just was as he was.

And people got that totally.

Yeah, we don't mind.

People don't mind, do they?

There used to be a thing, I don't think it would be allowed now,

but I did it with Supervisors are constantly looking for a machine to

hide behind so they don't have to be involved in what the workers are doing.

And I used to draw a square on the floor, is it?

It's a Japanese thing.

The Japanese were very big on this.

Draw a square on the floor and say, stand there, and you can move when

I come back and tell you to move.

And they may have to stand there for two, three, four hours.

But back in the day, 50, 60 years ago, that's what the foreman would do.

He would stand there, and you would feel his eyes on the back of your

neck while you're working away.

And by virtue of just standing there for a few hours, People approached with

problems and issues and things that they need an opinion on and it literally

changed overnight, the atmosphere on the shop floor and supervisors then

starts to come out of their shell.

So I think there's something to be said for that.

Just send all of the politicians up north and don't come back until you've

got something to say for yourself.

There's a radical agenda, Rob.

There we go.

We have a plan for moving forward.

I'll

go with them.

I'll go with them.

As long as they buy the beer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been great talking to you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you everyone.

It's a big issue.

Not one we can get answers from, but insights maybe.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks.