Joanne Paul: belief

Transcript context

…Why do you think the UK seems so stuck now, both politically and economically? There’s a lot of talent in the country, right? An incredible history, great location, English language, world’s best time zone. I think there’s a lot of things that have gone on in the UK in recent years that have led to a sense of stagnation, a sense of frustration, certainly a huge economic downturn. I’ll say explicitly that I think that Brexit posed a huge problem for the UK, both in terms of its identity and its economic position in the globe. We saw a huge standard-of-living crisis following Brexit, which we’re still not fully recovered from. I think there’s a lot of very short-termist thinking when it comes to investments. I’ll take the example of higher education. Of course, that’s an example which I find myself in. It’s one of the UK’s greatest commodities and products, is its education. When you think of great universities of the world, of course, Oxbridge comes up, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as you can think about the LSE, Imperial, so on and so forth. Yet, there has been a real disinclination to invest in higher education. There’s been real significant cuts to funding. There’s been attacks on the concept of expertise. There’s been particular attacks on the humanities, on history, indeed on languages. There’s a sense in which they’re shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to one of the UK’s great commodities and one of the things that upholds its reputation around the world. Unfortunately, there’s also been a lot of racism and xenophobia in this country, which of course sits beneath Brexit as well and has continued to pass that point, which has, I think, held us back from bigger conversations. We’ve gotten stuck on these topics, which are designed to divide and therefore, conquer. Very last question. Your last book, Thomas More: A Life, was what led to this podcast. Please tell us if you can, what will you do next? What do you want to do next?…

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