It's Bloody Complicated - A Compass Podcast

The 2024 general election result brings a welcome relief to UK politics. But now, we find ourselves at a crossroads: things are either going to get very much worse or very much better. There is no middle way.

Neither the state, nor business, nor civil society can go it alone and bring about a better world – we have to do it together. That means having a clear, shared vision of what this positive future might look like.

Compass’ New Settlement project seeks to establish the guiding principles and building blocks of a Good Society that is much more equal, democratic and sustainable. To discuss how we can make this vision a reality, we were joined by:

• Willie Sullivan, Senior Director at the Electoral Reform Society
• Fatima Ibrahim, Co-Executive Director of Green New Deal Rising
• Sue Goss, writer and author of the Compass report A New Settlement: For a Better Society
• Priya Sanhi-Nicholas, Co-Executive Director at the Equality Trust

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Enjoyed the podcast and want to be a live audience member at our next episode? Want to have the chance in raising questions to the panelist?

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You can find us on Twitter at @CompassOffice.

On the 4th July people across the country went to the polls for a long overdue, and bloody complicated, General Election. Labour ended up with a mammoth majority and the Tories were left with just 121 seats. But beyond the headline figures, there was a huge amount going on beneath the surface. This election produced one of the most disproportionate results we have ever seen, revealing a European-style multi-party politics struggling to break free from the straitjacket of our two-party system.

Neal Lawson and Frances Foley from the Compass office were joined by journalist John Harris and Labour campaigner Laura Parker us to discuss how exactly things changed so dramatically from 2019, and what 2024 holds for progressives and our country.

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With Labour far ahead in the polls our attention turns to where the opposition from the Left will come from.

We need to look no further than Nigel Farage and Reform UK – who could use the parliamentary base of Clacton to enact a shift to national populism of the kind we are now seeing in Italy, France and Germany.

To discuss the very real threat of the Right we were joined on the podcast by one of the authors of a brand new publication The Little Black Book of the Populist Right: What it is, why it’s on the march and how to stop it

• Jon Bloomfield is a writer, environmental practitioner, and author of Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham. In the 1980s, Jon served on the editorial board of Marxism Today.

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On this special general Election issue of Its Bloody Complicated we are delighted to
be joined by Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty. 

We’ve admired Aditya’s writing and reporting for years and have been keen to get
him on. Aditya doesn’t just critique what’s wrong in terms of the economy, society
and politics – he actively goes out and finds places and examples where things are
being done better – finding places for hope. But it was his article last week on the
threat poised by Nigel Farage that accelerated our desire to hear from him – in it
Aditya graphically illustrated how Farage and Reform UK set the tone of debate, now
primarily on the issue of immigration, and then watch first the Tories then labour
following their direction. Farage may or may not win the seat of Clacton but he is
already winning the general election debate.

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On Tuesday, 14th May we were joined by Ben Walker and Alison Lowe to analyse the campaigns and the results of the 2024 local elections, and reflect where we are coming up to a general election.

Ben Walker is a senior data journalist at the New Statesman and writes extensively about elections and UK public opinion. He is the co-founder of poll aggregator Britain Elects, and since 2023 is also a Cheshire West and Chester Councillor.

Alison Lowe OBE is the West Yorkshire Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime. She has been involved with local government for almost 30 years as a Labour councillor and as the Deputy Lord Mayor of Leeds in 2003-4. She is a well known campaigner on equal rights, and worked in the Third Sector for 30+ years, most recently as Chief Executive of Touchstone, a mental health charity specialising in working with people from different cultural backgrounds across West Yorkshire.

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Over the last few years, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform our society has become increasingly apparent. This comes with incredible opportunities – AI could help deepen our democracy and enable our politics to get closer to citizens to represent them more effectively – but is also fraught with risk. How can we take advantage of these opportunities while preventing AI from further destabilising our democracy with deepfakes and disinformation? To discuss all of this and more, we were joined by:

• Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, Senior Research Fellow at IPPR
• Laura Giesen, Editor in Chief at Democracy Technologies

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It was a watershed moment in October 2022 when the Labour Party conference overwhelmingly voted to include in its manifesto a commitment to change the voting system to proportional representation after the next election. Just the year before, despite mass support in the membership, the motion failed because the affiliated Trade Unions opposed the motion.

To discuss this historic shift, what the changing the voting systems means to the trade union movement, and where next, we’re excited to be joined by Lynn Henderson and Nancy Platts.

• Lynn is the chair of the Electoral Reform Society and also chairs Politics for the Many – the trade union campaign for electoral reform.  In her day job she is a senior national officer at the Public and Commercial Services Union, the UK’s largest trade union for government workers.  She is also a Trustee of the  Jimmy Reid Foundation, a think tank for radical political thinking, based in Scotland.
• Nancy Platts is a Consultant at Campaign Collective – a social enterprise which works with not-for-profits and other campaigners, providing high quality marketing, communications advice and PR support, and is the co-ordinator of Politics for the Many.

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Support for Scottish independence is still strong but the SNP are clearly in a weaker position, institutionally, reputationally, and ideologically. They have become mired in scandal, their hegemonic grip on politics north of the border looks to be loosening, and yet the constitutional questions about who governs Scotland and how remain relevant and live. Labour’s position has clearly strengthened – albeit without ever addressing key questions of democratic renewal and constitutional change.

With a UK general election less than a year away, especially while it looks like Labour could win power and form a majority, the context for the democratic left, the future of the UK and Scotland are changing – and with it how and how much the UK is bound together changes. What progressive and democratic reforms are feasible and desirable in this new context and how can the progressive democratic left work together are essential questions on either side of the independence case. To talk this through with us, Neal and Lena were joined by:

• Gerry Hassan is the author of several books on Scottish and British politics including ‘The Strange Death of Labour Scotland’ and ‘The People’s Flag and the Union Jack: An Alternative History of Britain and the Labour Party’.
• Esther Roberton, who was the coordinator of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the 1990s and has spent more than three decades serving on and chairing national and regional boards across significant areas of policy including health, education and justice, as well as initiatives relating to the Scottish Parliament and as Non-Executive Director of the Scottish Government.

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Citizens’ assemblies represent an alternative way of doing politics: a randomly selected group of citizens are convened to reason collectively, to consider evidence and to have discussions which should arrive at complex, nuanced decisions for the long term. As such, they’ve been called ‘democracy under good conditions’.

They have been credited with tackling some of the toughest political and ethical questions – such as abortion, AI, hate crime and nuclear power –generating balanced and often surprising solutions. Citizens’ assemblies aren’t some kind of wacky democratic experiment – they’re a tried-and-tested tool in our democratic arsenal. That’s why it’s no surprise that the Labour Party, if it wins the next election, is reportedly open to introducing citizens’ assemblies for some of the biggest, most complex concerns of our time – housebuilding, House of Lords reform and devolution.

To discuss this, we were joined by:

• Jamie Kelsey Fry, Global Assembly
• James Robertson, Sortition Foundation

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