This week, I was lucky enough to be the first ever guest to appear for a second time on the Bold Politics podcast with Zack Polanski. I was there to promote my new book The Nuance Drought. We also talked about where Britain is at politically, right now and the influence of tech/social media. You can listen to the conversation here. Above is a small snippet.
The second section of The Nuance Drought is about psychology and how we respond and adapt to an environment which is geared towards polarisation and binaries. One of the theories I posit is that the famous experiment which shows humans consistently choose definite pain over uncertainty explains the popularity of Reform.
It’s a strange dichotomy in many ways, because Reform can (and I believe would) be considerably worse than the Tories and Labour on human rights, privatisation, climate change and several other issues. And yet there is also a familiarity about them (not least of all because the party is stuffed with defected conservatives). Farage was a key architect of Brexit and has been generally hanging around lobbying and dictating the direction of our politics for a decade and a half, now. His party present themselves as a ‘burn it all down’ option when in actuality they are the embodiment of the very establishment they claim to be fighting.
This, I think, explains Reform’s enduring popularity amongst 1 in 5 of the electorate even as more stories of potential corruption surface. They are the Devil We Know.
The Nuance Drought is out on 10th September and you can pre-order it here.
