This week runs from the heavy to the daft. We start with the emergency alert and the wildfire risk that prompted it, which leads Peter into the Concept of the Week and the idea that the causes of things are almost always more tangled than a headline suggests.
Then the difficult part: the death of Professor Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic who faced a sustained campaign of online abuse, and what public shaming actually does to a person. We talk proportionality, the presumption of innocence that social media has quietly erased, and why a pile-on so often says more about the people holding the torches than the person they are aimed at. There is a clear line, we think, between raising a concern properly and setting out to shame someone.
After that we lighten the mood. Peter confesses he found the partial eclipse thoroughly underwhelming, which leads into why other people chase total eclipses across the planet, the awe of the night sky, and the fact that the people who built Stonehenge were every bit as clever as we are. And we finish with Count Binface giving Nigel Farage a run for his money in Clacton, and the strange charm of a democracy that lets a man campaign against a bin.
A heads up: this episode discusses a recent death, online abuse and mental health. Please take care if that is difficult for you.
If you have been affected
If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this episode, please contact your doctor, local support services, or your emergency services if in crisis. If you are in the UK, this NHS page signposts a range of mental health services.
Concept of the Week: INUS conditions
INUS, from the philosopher J.L. Mackie, which is a formal way of saying that causes are almost always more tangled than they look. A fire needs a spark, but the spark could have been a match, a lighter or a dropped cigarette, and no single one of them is the whole story. It is a useful lens for everything from why a wildfire took hold to why the far right gains ground: there is rarely one simple cause, however much a headline wants there to be.
The Triple T: wait a second
Wait a second before you respond. It sounds almost too obvious to say, but most of the harm we do, and most of the nonsense we spread, comes from reacting to a headline as though we already know the whole story. There is nearly always a backstory, a complication, a perspective you have not heard. So let investigations run their course, let the facts arrive, and above all do not send the tweet. It will almost certainly be wrong.
Full transcript (7,120 words)
Transcript generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Timings refer to the audio episode. If you spot an error, write to hello@experiencepodco.com.
Hilary Jeffs Hello and welcome to Experience, your new weekly podcast where we get to psychoanalyse the news. We take those news headlines and we use them to decipher why people behave the way that they do. Luckily for you, you don't just get my take on it, you get an actual expert. His name is Professor Peter Kinderman. Hello and welcome to our show yet again, Peter.
Peter Kinderman Hello there.
Hilary Jeffs It's always wonderful to have you. How has your week been?
Peter Kinderman My week's been up and down, with trips and visits, and then a restorative lie-in on Sunday morning. So I'm feeling okay.
Hilary Jeffs See, I can't lie in anymore. How did you manage that?
Peter Kinderman Kids somewhere else, plenty of time, turned the phone off, and it just happened. It was a remarkable gift from nature.
Hilary Jeffs Oh, that is wonderful. Was that also a gift from a few libations, maybe, that helped?
Peter Kinderman Not overdoing it on the intoxication front, but I needed to catch up on my sleep, because I'd been camping and I'd been to a friend's, and you don't sleep well in other people's beds, so I probably needed the extra sleep.
Hilary Jeffs Camping and me, I really don't get much sleep. I have to have the full works. I'm rubbish. Some people can just sleep anywhere. My husband's one of those people who can sleep on a plane or on a train. Whereas me, if I'm not in my bed with my pillow, then honestly, I'm not sure I'd have evolved if I'd been born at any other time, when there weren't duvets, pillows and a decent mattress.
Peter Kinderman Quite right. Yeah, absolutely. And I vowed many years ago never to go camping again, and then was convinced I should change my mind by a woman. It's just the way things go.
Hilary Jeffs Yeah. And also, when you have young kids, you kind of have to do it. You have to go through that punishment, I think that's what it is. Although I do like a good camp and a good picnic, so that always makes you feel better. My week was a joyful week: I spent eight hours in A&E. That's always a gift that keeps on giving, isn't it? And what I discovered was, people talk about the younger generation as having no patience , give them a smartphone and they'll sit there forever on TikTok. Mine were fine. It was me who was starting to get really kind of, okay, why are we still waiting? And why are there just four people in x-ray chatting for the last 45 minutes? Oh, and now they're pulling the... oh, now they're going home. Great. So I was getting quite chippy and they were entirely relaxed. Why have they got more patience than me?
Peter Kinderman Could it be morphine?
Hilary Jeffs He did have some Oramorph, but not till right at the end, to be fair. Yeah. So, a broken leg, we've got an operation coming up. That'll be nice.
Peter Kinderman Parents worry about their children. And if your mother's worrying about you, you don't have to. So you can concentrate on TikTok. You're there to absorb the angst. It's your role in life.
Hilary Jeffs Great. I really am so pleased with my life choices right now. Today we're going to be talking about some tragic stuff, and some more interesting, fun stuff as well. On this week's show, coming up, we're going to be talking about the tragic death of Professor Arday and the public shaming that has really come to pass over the last couple of weeks. Then we're going to be talking about the awe and splendour of a partial eclipse, before we go on to say, well done Nigel Farage, did you manage to beat a bin? That's all coming up in our show, and we're going to, as ever, get the psychological take. But if we could start our show this week with your concept of the week, Peter , what is that?
Peter Kinderman So the concept of the week is related to the idea of explanations and attributions, the way that we explain things. And it's a bit complicated, and a bit academic, but it's also wonderful. There's a philosopher called Mackie who came up with something called INUS. And INUS stands, I think, if I can remember, for insufficient and unnecessary, but they're still causes. So it's summed up as: it's probably much more complicated than you think it is. He raised the idea of what caused a fire, and you go, well, it was petrol and a match. But you wouldn't have needed the petrol if you'd got an old newspaper, and you wouldn't have needed a match if you'd got a cigarette lighter. So the petrol and the match, neither of them was necessary and neither was sufficient for the fire, and yet they were still causes. And it changes the way we think about causes, and the way we think about how to explain the things that happen in life. There's probably a lot more going on, and it's probably a lot more complicated, and it's certainly a lot less definitive than we think it is. And that includes human frailties. So if somebody fails to do something and tragedy ensues, there's a temptation to say it's all down to them. But Mackie would say, well, there's a lot more going on. There are reasons why reasons happen, and the reasons might have been one of many things that could have caused that tragic chain of events. It happened to be that one. But there's something about the moral philosophy of it that helps you think: things could have been very different and still come up with the same outcome.
Hilary Jeffs So is this a bit like when people say that Brexit or the rise of the far right is simply a reaction against foreigners, a kind of racist thing, where what's going on most likely is much more complicated and often stems from the financial inequalities in life? Is that what it means, that you just need to look deeper and deeper into what's going on?
Peter Kinderman Yeah. So one of the conversations about these sorts of consequences , if you look on Wikipedia, they talk about it with the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, where there was a tragedy and quite a few people died, and the idea of, why should this tragedy have happened? And then working back the causality: why would the storage tanks flood with water, and why would there be no bulkheads between the compartments, and why would the doors have been left open, and why would it have been nose-heavy? And similar things with tragedies like aircraft crashes and moon landings and so forth. And it relates to insurance as well. If you've got a house with many combustible things in it, then that's a risk, because any number of things could start the fire. It's the same as the warning about barbecues and not having outdoor fires during a heatwave: if the hills are combustible, many things could cause the fire, so we should avoid all of those risks. When it comes to things like the rise of fascism, I think, yes, it does apply, which is that there will always be an excuse. In a way, the analogy, the metaphor is correct: there'll always be a spark that will light the fire. So if people are looking for something to have a culture war about, we will always find something that we can tweet and harass people over. There will always be that stuff around. So any particular incident has to be seen in the context of the circumstances in which it's being debated.
Hilary Jeffs I thought the whole high-alert thing was quite interesting, because I was sat in A&E at the time and everyone's pagers started going off, and then again a little bit later. All of the staff, all of the nurses, they were sort of discombobulated by it. I think having it go off in a hospital made them much more nervous about what the consequences of it were. What did you think about getting that alert? Did you think it was OTT or pretty sensible?
Peter Kinderman I thought it was pretty sensible, and , sorry, maybe I'm a little bit dull , it made me think, from what I know of these things, there is almost certainly quite a degree of civil service behind it. So there will have been a series of messages discussed by people without much of a political agenda, saying, what is the risk of death here? What is the risk of major property damage? What's the probability? Is there anything we can do? And only then would somebody in politics be advised. And my experience of it, which is limited, is that they were probably advised very directly, as in: we have policies that say an alert should go out under the following circumstances; it is our judgement, Prime Minister, that those circumstances have been met; we strongly advise you to put out an alert. Rather than some sort of game-playing by politicians.
Hilary Jeffs Eighteen houses did burn down.
Peter Kinderman So you work the logic backwards ,
Hilary Jeffs It's not small beer, is it?
Peter Kinderman It's not small beer, and we've had a fire just outside Manchester that took days to come under control, and firefighters die when confronting fire. So the backwards logic made me think, the fire service is probably finding that they're at considerable risk, and yes, we should all take a moment to be cautious about that.
Hilary Jeffs Well, on our Nextdoor app , you know, the local app where everyone sort of grasses everyone else up , there was quite a lot of consternation, because in the woods just across the road from me, a lady had been spotted on several days nipping across there a bit furtively. So perhaps she'd meant to have given up smoking and actually hadn't, and was clocked having a cigarette and then putting it out on the floor of the woods. And of course people are like, oh my goodness, you must not do that, because you could start a fire, and the woods are very close to a number of houses. This was a perfectly rational, my-age kind of woman who was doing that behaviour, and she hasn't been seen since. So perhaps a little bit of, "hello, please don't do this," helped.
Peter Kinderman Well, and it also tells the rest of us that if people are smoking and putting out cigarettes, we'll check for them that they've been put out, because that would just be a sensible thing to do.
Hilary Jeffs Absolutely. Okay, so we're going to move on to the tragic death of Professor Arday. This absolutely saddened me so much when I got the news alert through while I was waiting in A&E. As a mum of kids who are on the autistic spectrum, I really did feel for the level of public shaming that happened to Professor Arday. And I just want to make clear that our thoughts are with his family and his friends, because it seemed quite disproportionate to me, what that man went through compared to what the alleged crimes might have been. There's quite a lot of chat that perhaps this was racism-induced, or that academia is inherently racist. A number of people have spoken out, pretty much straight away. Andy Burnham talked about it being a tragedy and asked people not to rush to judgement, and said it should be a time of reflection. The first ever Black cabinet minister said racism in academia is a fact of life and needs to be addressed , I'd like your view on that in a minute. Now, Professor Arday lived in Batley with his family, and Sadiq Khan said that this was an unacceptable public hounding and a co-ordinated campaign of abuse, and said that Arday was a victim of pernicious shaming. And of course, shaming is what Thomas Wyatt, the poet, said was a punishment worse than death. It was the greatest punishment you can give another person. What does being publicly shamed do to someone?
Peter Kinderman Well, I think you're absolutely right: shame is pernicious and absolutely harmful. There are some elements about people who have a public profile, where shame is obviously worse if you are well known. One of the things about Arday is that he wasn't actually known until people started shaming him, which is terrible. But if you are in the public eye, or people put you in the public eye , and I think there's something about academia where people's name and CV and achievements are very closely connected. It's them, it's their personality and their identity. And yeah, you quoted Wyatt, which I think is spot on. It's a way of trying to harm people, and I think we all know that. We've all been shamed. Most of the people I know have been bullied. We know what it's like to feel shame, and the choice to do that to somebody else is quite a cruel one. So I think there's an element here of people being deliberately shaming. The take I found most positive about this tragedy was actually Chris Patten's, who's the Chancellor of the university. He was saying both that if people raise concerns about somebody's performance in an academic job , especially one that has some sort of public significance, like a professor at a major university , then that should be investigated. But you do it without shaming and without rushing to judgement. And I think he's right. You mentioned proportion, and there are people on social media saying, well, I'm sorry he's dead, but... almost as if taking your own life is proportionate to an unproven challenge about the authenticity of some of your work on your CV. And I looked it up before I came on the show, just to be clear: if you look at the stats, at the police records, thirty per cent of forty-one-year-old men in the UK have a criminal conviction ,
Hilary Jeffs Whoa.
Peter Kinderman And that's not including road-traffic offences. So you've got to think, what level of hounding is appropriate? Now, it might be the case that none of those people are journalists, that there is not a single journalist among the thirty per cent of the population who've got a criminal conviction , but I doubt it. And maybe those journalists who do have a criminal conviction wisely stay away from the shaming war, but I doubt it. And then you've got to think, even if that's true: are we saying that mistakes which are spotted, addressed and responded to are then unforgivable? So I like the Chris Patten approach, because it says, we don't know what's going on, and if there was something going on, then the appropriate authorities will take the appropriate, reasonable steps. It's not really your business; you can just wait a bit and see how it all plays out. Whereas what we got was people who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, had never known the man, had never sat on a PhD viva, never sat on a research misconduct committee, passing judgement over somebody whose death they appear to care nothing about. And that's where the racism comes in, because it does seem as if a dead Black man is relatively unimportant compared to a point they want to make on Twitter.
Hilary Jeffs Yes, I understand what you're saying. We do have a very essential tenet in this country, and in other countries around the world, which is that you're innocent until proven guilty. But social media has wiped that away.
Peter Kinderman I think we also have a general tenet of proportionality. I've certainly made mistakes, not only in my personal life but in my career. The people around me know about the mistakes I've made, and the authorities know about them, and things have been addressed. So we address these things and we learn from them, and I suspect that's true for most people. I suspect most people have had their bosses give them a quiet word. There are quite a lot of retractions in the general media, corrections , the Guardian famously has its corrections column. There are changes of mind. There are people saying, I didn't realise this at the time. People make mistakes all the time. And I think it's terrible when mistakes are responded to disproportionately, when they're responded to in a way that looks like it's absolutely deliberate shaming. And I think the race element does come into it on this occasion.
Hilary Jeffs The people who commit the public shaming , those who are lighting the torches and throwing the stones, on social media or indeed in real life , what do they gain from that behaviour?
Peter Kinderman Well, in the course of my career I've been on social media putting forward various views that I think are correct , otherwise I wouldn't say them , and certainly defensible, and people have been very vitriolic in the public debate about things I've said. And I read their comments carefully, and I talk to their colleagues about it, and sometimes complain to the authorities about their behaviour. The message coming back is that they think they're morally in the right. So in a sense they're saying: your behaviour is outrageous, and outrageous behaviour should be confronted. They might even think that behaviour is so outrageous that it warrants an equally outrageous response. So they'd say, it's outrageous that Kinderman is allowed to put forward such outrageous views in such an outrageous fashion, the consequences are terrible. And we can think of what people would argue about , the consequences of inappropriate appointments to senior professorships might be consequential in terms of educational privilege and educational standards. So people are saying, this behaviour is outrageous, therefore I am outraged, and I will give you my outrage. I don't really buy it , I don't buy it in this case because of the race element, and I also don't buy it because they appear not to know anything about what they're talking about, and yet they're outraged. It's a strong opinion of mine that one of the defining features of human psychology , and it certainly defines my politics , is the balance between selfishness, competitiveness, and generosity. And I'd conclude that probably those people who express outrage about another person's behaviour in this sort of context aren't very generous. They're prepared to harm others, they're prepared to put forward points of view where it seems they're not very concerned about the consequences, or even whether they're right or wrong. So it seems a selfish attitude to me: I feel some outrage, therefore I'm going to shame you, I don't care how it lands with you. And you hear that with people like Toby Young and Julia Hartley-Brewer saying, "well, yes, but." And if somebody's died, you don't say "but."
Hilary Jeffs I'd definitely agree with that. I wonder, though, whether it's also that people feel bigger as a result of doing this , getting on that moral high horse, and suddenly it boosts them up and makes them feel better. But also, haven't the social norms changed since we've had Trump in the White House? All of a sudden it's completely okay in public discourse to be rude publicly to other people. There used to be a situation where you weren't allowed to do that sort of thing, where people in positions of responsibility and power didn't behave that way, and now it's kind of been sanctioned from the top. If the President of the United States can behave in such an irresponsible way with their words, then why shouldn't we? This is how you handle people you don't agree with.
Peter Kinderman Leadership is important. When I became a university lecturer, I was told, quite straightforwardly, that if you're in front of a class of 120 people and the fire alarm goes off, then sort it out, because they'll all be looking to you for leadership. And it's simply true: if you're sitting in an audience and the lecturer carries on lecturing, you'll sit in the audience. So leadership in politics , Andy Burnham, Trump and so forth , is actually important. It's about moral leadership as well as just making policies. So I think you're right about Trump and those expressions. I think there's also an element whereby we haven't caught up with social media. In professional misconduct issues involving social media, one of the benchmarks that the judges of these cases are asked to consider is: would it be unacceptable if you said it in a louder-than-normal speaking voice on a crowded train platform? People say utterly outrageous things on Twitter that, if they said them in the committee room of a major corporation, would lead to their dismissal. So we haven't caught up with the fact that just because you can type it into Twitter drunk at three in the morning doesn't mean it's acceptable, and we need to guard against that. And the point about picking yourself up , that's the point of racism, and it's the point of far-right politics at the moment. If you've got policies that would actively disadvantage lower-than-average income earners, how can you get lower-than-average income voters to vote for you, even though your policies are inexplicably bad for them? What you say is, we'll help you gang up on somebody even worse off than you. And because of this divide between generosity and competition, there are sadly a large number of people who go, yeah, I quite like hating other people, because it makes me feel better about myself, or at least not as bad. At least I'm better than them. And if you have lots of messages saying those people are worthless and you are not those people , it's a very false message, but it's one that does appeal to people.
Hilary Jeffs Hate, and feeling bad about other people, and not feeling generous of spirit, always makes me feel tired and grumpy. My quality of life is not good when I'm angry at other people. It's so much better if I'm trying to worry about what I can change and what I can do to make things better, rather than being frustrated at everything else going on. Surely all this collective hate on Twitter must be doing something quite damaging to society, don't you think , to our health, to our wellbeing?
Peter Kinderman I think we'd all be a lot better off if we hadn't developed social media in the way that we have. We'd all be a lot better off if there were some system whereby we were exposed to this sort of stuff only for limited periods, at the right time of day. On the whole, it's a little bit like alcopops: I can see why people buy them, but I'd rather they didn't exist.
Hilary Jeffs Yeah, good point. I like that. Okay, well, if you've been affected by anything we've talked about today, then we've got notes of where you can get some help in our show notes, so click on that and you'll find some places to go. Moving on from that terrible story , it's so sad , to the partial eclipse. Were you enchanted by the partial eclipse?
Peter Kinderman No. Totally underwhelmed. Totally underwhelmed.
Hilary Jeffs This is something awesome, and you were thoroughly underwhelmed?
Peter Kinderman Yeah.
Hilary Jeffs Can I suggest you were underprepared and didn't have the right equipment?
Peter Kinderman We had a variety of eclipse scopes. We went onto a patch of common ground where we had a beautiful view of the setting sun in the western sky. We were there appropriately, socially distanced from other people, but there were quite a lot of people there. It was a nice collective atmosphere. Some people with a few drinks, people with colanders, which is great, people with viewing scopes of various kinds. I met a friend, and after a few minutes she said, "when's it going to happen, then?" And we went, "it was five minutes ago." We were talking all the way along. I didn't exactly miss it , we were kind of looking at it and taking projections of it, and the sky dimmed a little bit, and we went, "oh, right," and, "oh look, you can see a big chunk of it taken out," and, "oh yeah, that's interesting," and then we went back to the conversation about, I don't know, Tupperware or whatever it was. So no, I'm sorry, I'm just going to be honest, it was mildly underwhelming.
Hilary Jeffs Yeah. Well, I actually quite enjoyed it. Obviously the sky did not really go dark, certainly not in West Sussex, it didn't go dark at all. And actually, until we put on our glasses , because we were standing around going, oh, when's it going to happen, put on the glasses, oh, okay, it's nearly over. It's astonishing how much light still comes off when you've got the majority of the sun blocked out by the moon.
Peter Kinderman So I live in Manchester, and it's cloudy quite a lot of the time, so the idea that the sun is shining at only five per cent of its magnitude is kind of not... maybe that's the reason. But two days later ,
Hilary Jeffs You didn't get it.
Peter Kinderman Two days later I was in North Wales, out in the countryside, staring up at the night sky looking for Perseid meteors, and thought that was absolutely wonderful. So it's not that I'm a... no. I'm veering on the Brian Cox scale , I'm a solid eight on the Brian Cox scale. I think the majesty of the universe is wonderful, but I didn't get it with the partial eclipse, sorry.
Hilary Jeffs You see, we quite enjoyed watching it, I have to say , so much so that I've actually booked to go to Spain next year. I'm becoming a bit of a budding eclipse-chaser now. There are people who get absolutely addicted and go around the world. Why are people getting addicted to it? I liked it, and I think I might as well book my holiday by it, because I remember the one in 1999, and that really was impressive. But why are people literally trekking miles off route into the middle of forests and woodland, to the edge of the earth, to see these things? Why do people get hooked on it?
Peter Kinderman Well, after the eclipse we went, "well, that was all right, but it was a bit underwhelming , maybe we'll go to South Africa next year, or the year after, and do exactly the trek you're talking about," because that would be spectacular. I'm not saying eclipses aren't spectacular. I'm saying that wasn't an eclipse, it was a partial eclipse, and a partial eclipse is only partially spectacular. Why would we do it? Well, you go camping and you sit in nature and you look at the hills and you think, this is wonderful. And then you sit in nature and you look at the night sky and you think, this is amazing. And you have a conversation about distant galaxies and space aliens, and then a few Perseid meteors come through and you go, oh wow, I just saw one, and you sit there for another fifteen minutes waiting for another one. And the eclipse is that, but much bigger and more powerful, and it brings all of that wonder of nature together.
Hilary Jeffs So is an eclipse actually a big enough draw for you to go back camping? You had a camping holiday not that long ago and you were entirely underwhelmed by it. But is it back on the cards, another camping sort of trip, if you've forgotten the hell already?
Peter Kinderman Well, being a generous sort of person, I'm prepared to go through the hell of camping if those close to me want to go through the hell of camping , then I'll sign up and say yes. Would I choose to do it? I'd probably choose a decent four-star hotel with a dark-nights policy over camping. I'd probably prefer camping to not seeing an eclipse. Yeah, I'd go through camping for an eclipse. Even with the ninety-five per cent probability that it'll rain, I'll still do it.
Hilary Jeffs And I didn't stay up for the meteor shower, so I'm glad that you did , out of the two of us. I don't even like fireworks, and yet there was something about this that I found quite mesmerising. And what I found out was that in 585 BC, on the 28th of June, I think it was , we know the date exactly, if I could just remember it , a six-year war was brought to an end when there was an eclipse in the sky. I mean, that's really something. There's a collective psychological effect of eclipses on the population, isn't there? Not just on the individual, but collectively , what's going on with people there?
Peter Kinderman Well, there are stories we're told, and if we assume they're true, then people were so aware of the rising of the sun and the setting of the sun that it became a fixed point in our existence. And then when it gets disrupted by an eclipse, there's something extraordinary and dangerous happening , the world is being turned in a way that we very fundamentally don't understand, and therefore it's a profound event for us. And the stories also tell , when we read the history books, whether they're fantasy, which they sometimes are, or whether they're true , that the wise people of the community knew the eclipse was coming, and therefore could predict it. So there's the superstition and wonder of the populace, and the power of the people with access to that knowledge.
Hilary Jeffs Thousands of years ago they had actual hand-turning, computer-type machines to predict what the sky was doing at any one time, which is really quite astonishing, isn't it , the level of detail people had handed down about the movement of the stars.
Peter Kinderman Like I said, I'm a solid eight on the Brian Cox metre, and I quite like astronomical things, and I quite like thinking about distant stars. I know where the sun rises, because I know the pattern of light that shines through the bedroom window. But if you took me to Salisbury Plain and gave me fourteen large stones and said, "set them up so that on the longest day of the year the sun shines through the axis of your construction," I wouldn't have a hope in hell. But these people 6,000 years ago were able to do that. And one of the things there, incidentally, is that they were just as intelligent as we are. When Stonehenge was built, there's been no evolution , none to speak of , in the human brain since then. So one of the things I quite like about sitting outside and looking at the skies is that I'll have a conversation with other university-educated friends about all sorts of sophisticated ideas about the night sky, and the people before Stonehenge was built had just as sophisticated an analysis of the situation as we do. Their brains were just as clever. They weren't grunting at each other in some sort of subhuman idiocy , they were very, very clever people thinking about their world. And I think that's miraculous.
Hilary Jeffs It is astounding to think of it in those terms. But perhaps we've reached peak intelligence, haven't we? Is there any indication that our intelligence is actually declining, with the rise of technology and things?
Peter Kinderman There is indeed. So, starting around 1772 , Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, the French Revolution, all of this , we started to invent this thing called democracy, which meant that for future generations we can look at today's culture and think, there's a system by which adult human beings can select the best and most fitted of their kind to serve as a benchmark of progress. And we've elected Donald Trump and a bin. So, obviously, given that that's a bad idea, we're on the decline now. Like a rollercoaster , accept it, it's all going to go to hell.
Hilary Jeffs Okay, if we're moving on to the bin, let's move on to the bin, because you say electing a bin would be a bad idea. Did you see Count Binface's policies in the Clacton by-election?
Peter Kinderman I didn't read them all in detail. I knew he'd promised to build one affordable home. But, yeah.
Hilary Jeffs So there was this one , I think you'd agree with it , nationalising the songs of Adele, so that the profits go into the NHS rather than into some fat-cat corporations. I thought you'd like that. Moving a pub hand-dryer in Oxbridge , I'm kind of like, I need to see the context there. But my favourite: enforcing a 99p price on a 99 ice cream.
Peter Kinderman I think it's an instant winner. There's no time I've been queuing up for an ice cream and seen 99s on the list without saying they should be 99p. It's just a fact. Yeah.
Hilary Jeffs You've tapped into the psyche here, come on.
Peter Kinderman If necessary, we should use taxpayers' money to subsidise the price of 99s, and then kids would be reasonably well fed on fake fat and sugar, I suppose, but at least they'd get some calories. So, yeah.
Hilary Jeffs I have to say, an ice cream a day, I think, would make everyone happier. Maybe a bit fatter , or maybe not fatter, because I reckon an ice cream might be better than some of the treats out there.
Peter Kinderman Well, you could have an ice cream and a three-kilometre run and you'd be fine. I think it's nearly perfect. And because I don't agree with him, I quite like the idea of Farage staging stunts that get his message across. I hesitated during saying that, because we were talking about shaming earlier, and I actually don't want Farage to be shamed. I would really like it if Farage just simply left ,
Hilary Jeffs I don't think there's any chance of that. He's been part of the political landscape for many decades now, and is quite rightly probably starting to be perceived as a little bit of the institution already.
Peter Kinderman What I would say to him is that if he's going to stage a stunt and there's a bin involved, then it's almost his choice to put himself through that. So he's more like a contestant on It's a Knockout than a political campaigner.
Hilary Jeffs Isn't he a former contestant from the jungle?
Peter Kinderman Well, exactly, yeah. Eating sheep's testicles or kangaroo testicles. And I think one of the things , I mean, I'm not a particularly patriotic person, but it does make me think, wow, Britain's got some nice traditions. The idea of asking permission from Rachel Reeves, whether he might please resign, and her saying, well, if you really want to fight a bin, I'll let you resign , with the kind of supposition that she could have refused, but she's going to let him humiliate himself. And then the idea of crowing repeatedly after having won the election against a bin, only to find himself back in the mire with the Parliamentary Standards Authority. And if it does end up with the Parliamentary Standards Authority saying there has to be a rerun of the election in Clacton, that would just be heaven. I'm willing for £260,000, or whatever it is, to stage a by-election of taxpayers' money to be spent, just to let that process do its stately course through politics.
Hilary Jeffs Well, I'm sure if there was another by-election, there wouldn't be the record 34 candidates there were this time, which gave them the most expensive ballot paper, I think, ever, of all time. But only two of them got their money back, because you have to reach the threshold to be able to get your deposit back for standing in an election. And that was Count Binface and Farage. In his statement after winning, Farage was talking about what an honour it was that he'd been re-elected by Clacton with an increased majority. So in 2024 he got 21,225 votes, and he's added to that total , he's now at around 22,239 votes, with a bin as really the only main contender. Count Binface got 9,455 votes, which actually wasn't as much as... do you know that when he stood in the last two mayoral elections, guess how many votes he got?
Peter Kinderman Absolutely no idea.
Hilary Jeffs A four-figure number , any ideas?
Peter Kinderman I wouldn't like to guess, but I would expect less than a thousand.
Hilary Jeffs 24,000 votes. So Count Binface is actually on the move. It'd be interesting to see whether he could make any more national policies that people might be interested in. Anyway.
Peter Kinderman But you see, there are links with all of this, and it's more complicated. The alerts , I think politicians who get elected into high office are going to get people vociferously disagreeing with them, and there's not an awful lot they can do about that. People will be outraged by what they see as a very simple issue, and they're outraged because the person enacting the decisions isn't, A, seeing it from their point of view, and, B, isn't saying it's really, really simple. And the reason is that it's not really, really simple.
Hilary Jeffs Back to the concept of the week , remind us again, what was that called?
Peter Kinderman It's called INUS, and it's the idea that the causes of events are sometimes neither necessary nor sufficient. There's just a whole melange of factors that make the event more likely to happen in any given circumstances. So what you've got is people sitting down the pub going, "that alert was just ridiculous," and you go, well, yeah , but the most cogent criticism of the alert I've heard is that if you, especially women, have a secret phone around the house that you use in case your partner is going to be violent to you, so you can call for a taxi to get out of the house, it will have gone off, and your partner now knows you've got a secret phone. And that's dangerous. That's quite a cogent argument. If I was Andy Burnham, and civil servants were saying, "there are 18 houses destroyed, we've got firefighters who are at risk, it's difficult to get rotations for them because they're on alert all the time, there's a high risk of major property or infrastructure damage , but on the other hand, we're putting people at risk," he can't win, can he? He can't come out of it without somebody being offended. And if you've got instances of people in high-profile academic jobs, where, sitting down the pub after point number three, it's obvious to you that that person shouldn't have done that thing, then you'll get offended. So for people voting for Count Binface, I think there are quite a lot who say, "oh, for God's sake, why are all of these people so stupid, the answer's obvious" , and then, "we'll kick out the Muslims."
Hilary Jeffs Yeah. Well, lots of people do make that kind of connection, don't they, as we know. And really it's very sad. Well, we've had an interesting romp through the headlines this week , especially getting back to our idea about doing our camping at some point in the future. Before we move off this podcast for the week, could you perhaps give us a tip to try, something that's going to make us a bit calmer, perhaps a little bit saner, as we go forward for the rest of our week?
Peter Kinderman Well, it's a really simple thing, and a really obvious thing, and I'm slightly embarrassed for saying it because it's too simple and obvious, which is: just wait a second before responding to things. With everything, really. I think it's easy to go, "I've seen a headline, I absolutely know what the answer is, and it's obvious to me that those people are idiots, so here's the answer" , and it's probably more complicated than that. There's always stuff you don't know, there's always things going on that you're not aware of, there's always a backstory to these things, and the simple solution often has consequences you're not aware of when you're just spouting nonsense. And other people's perspectives are often valid. Even making a declaration that you're never going to go camping again , just have a think. I'm probably not going to go camping again, but if there's a good argument, then I might consider it. Just take a moment before concluding things. And that means, on news stories, waiting and hearing the evidence, finding out what's going on, letting investigations run their course, assuming that there might be reasons why people do what they do , including things like police investigations and news stories. The world is so complicated, and the stories of human beings are so enmeshed with each other, that simple answers coming across the headlines are nearly always simplistic. So we should wait a moment before deciding what we're going to do on a day-to-day basis, and we should certainly wait a moment before forming our own minds about big news stories. And, absolutely, definitely, we should wait a moment before sending a tweet. Just don't send a bloody tweet, because it'll almost certainly be wrong.
Hilary Jeffs Yes. Or an "X," or whatever they're called. Luckily I don't go anywhere near that platform, especially not since Musk decided to get into bed with the octogenarian in the White House.
Peter Kinderman Horrible idea.
Hilary Jeffs I should leave you with that image.
Peter Kinderman The image is burned into my occipital lobes now.
Hilary Jeffs Luckily for me, I've got aphantasia , something we need to talk about in the future , so I don't get to see any of those pictures, and I can say it with impunity. Next week we'll be back, discussing more headlines. If you have anything in particular that you'd like us to cover, we would love to hear from you. Thank you very much, Peter, for a great week, and we look forward to seeing you again next week.
Peter Kinderman Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Hilary Jeffs The Experience Podcast is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Peter Kinderman, produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. You can find us on social media, and you can get in touch by email at hello@experiencepodco.com with any questions, comments or topics you'd like us to cover. And don't forget to leave us a review.