In Listening Mode

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Amanda Nucci here in a studio in London.

And it's Helen Does for the first time in the very same studio in London.

Wow, that's amazing.

To those of you who are new to this astonishing production that can get two people in one place at one time, every week we take a phrase or a word that's in the ether politically and then we forensically examine it to see what it's actually doing.

And we've had a kind of a listening exercise.

four episodes in and we've decided to go for the phrase in listening mode.

I am in listening mode now.

Are you in in listening mode?

Are you engaged listening mode?

Yes, and there are two types of listening.

There's active listening and passive listening, which we'll go on to discuss in a moment.

But this is really because both

defeated parties in the UK and in the US are now declaring that they're going to go on a listening exercise.

So the Democrats in America are doing all sorts of soul searching and are saying to lots of people, we hear you.

Even though when somebody says, I hear you, what they actually mean is, I fundamentally disagree with you and here's why anyway that's happening and Kebri Badenock has said she's not going to go into policy announcements at the moment having just taken over the leadership of the conservatives she wants to listen and hear what people say well I think there's in both cases there's a kind of clarity in defeat so the democrats were not you know didn't just go down to an electoral college loss they lost the popular vote you know in raw vote terms donald trump did better than them and the same thing with the tories they lost a lot of seats in the summer and when that happens you can't kind of go oh it was you you know, this bit of our presentation, or maybe this one.

You have to go, oh, oh, no, they hated us.

They looked at us and they thought, no, we don't want you.

But then I have to ask, then, why have a listening exercise?

Because what's the point of having a listening exercise having just had the biggest listening exercise you can have, which is the entire country?

If you've heard what the country has to say, what is the merit of then saying, I'm going to listen to bits of that country a little bit closer?

I found this interesting piece by the writer Dan Davis in which he said said one of the fundamental problems with political systems now is they're huge and bureaucratic and very far away.

Politicians actually find it very hard to listen.

So his suggestion was that maybe populism comes out of that because the only, I think the way he phrased it was like the only information that this channel can convey is a scream.

Yeah.

Right?

So you just, every so often voters go, no, I hate this.

No, I don't like this at all.

Rather than on an kind of ongoing basis, them actually genuinely listening to voters.

Yes, if we could just break that scream down into its composite parts, then there might be aspects of the scream that we can turn around.

Is that what they're saying?

I think that's probably true.

I have a theory about the listening exercise in politics, which is I think it's like, you know, like sleep training for babies, like controlled crying.

And the idea is if you let them go on for long enough, they'll sort of just wear themselves out.

Well, yes, and it's in because my suspicion about listening exercises is it's just a means of looking like you're making a radical difference.

And as you say, allowing

whether it's party members or members of the electorate to just sound off.

And once that's done, you can move on and do what you were intending to do anyway.

It's just a way of ticking a box that says, you know, have you communicated in a proper, meaningful way with your supporters?

Yeah, done that.

And now do you want to speak to your donors and your think tanks and your special advisors to actually come up with policies?

I think there's another way it can be used, which is probably more democratic but equally cynical, which is when you as a strategist know that you need to move the party's position on something, but there are stakeholders, a great word, within the party who don't want you to do that.

You go, shall we actually listen to what voters think on this?

And then maybe at that point, we'll have to acknowledge that although we like this very much, we're never going to win an election with this position.

Yes, but then you have to then get into the exercise of choosing the people you listen to carefully so that they can give you the shout or scream or answer that then would be useful.

to pass on to those who are opposing you, I suppose.

There was definitely a vogue, and I think it's passed over now about 10 years ago, about listen to X.

You know, it would be like, so listen to sex workers, and you'd go, well, but which ones?

You know, the ones who think it's a very liberating profession or the ones who think it was incredibly traumatic and scarring.

But it was a way of kind of just saying that obviously there's a very simple answer here.

If we just listen to people with X identity marker, but you pick them, the people with that identity marker who agree with you anyway.

Like that makes it the hollow kind of exercise.

And that ties in with I feel your pain, which was a very kind of Bill Clinton mode, wasn't it?

People talked about when he was in a room and came over to talk to you.

He looked at you as if you were the only person in the room and the only person he was interested in.

But it was a technique to make you feel special.

And he kind of perfected that mode of, you know, I feel your pain.

And I think the answer that Kamala Harris got from her vast listening exercise conducted over the last 100 days was that people didn't feel that she felt their pain.

That in fact, she had, you know, Beyoncé's phone number.

She felt Beyoncé's pain.

She felt his absolutely.

You know,

I mean, the way the, you know, the digital oppression of musicians, you know, and I, that, that last week of getting celebs in to, you know, bolster her, I don't know, status, I think was a massive turnover for people who felt not being listened to in a proper way.

Yeah, well, as people who've listened to the extended edition will know, that was a side bit of you losing Wisconsin for the democracy.

Oh, right, yes.

So you and Beyonce, I'm bracketing together here.

Yeah, I hear you.

I hear you.

Don't you think also that it's a softer cousin of another great phrase, the judge-led inquiry?

Yes.

And there is something brilliant about the fact that just an inquiry.

No, no, no.

Judge-led inquiry.

Yeah, it can't just be led by anyone.

It has to be a judge.

Yes, and then it depends on which judge.

In fact, I think we did, I think, of an episode where there was a scramble to get the right judge to head up the inquiry so that the minister could wriggle scot-free.

Yeah, if you're going to do an inquiry into sort of whether or not we should legalise capital punishment and you kind of get in hanging Judge Jones, then it's sort of it's rigged it in advance, I suppose.

The two aspects of I Hear You Now that have come up this week.

One is the fact that it's now the government that's saying it's in listing mode.

Last week we talked about how perhaps legacy media has had its day and it's social media that people get their news from, that crowdsourcing of information has taken the place of the

properly paid investigative journalists.

But now it seems to be the that government itself is trying to subcontract itself out to the people.

We've got West Streeting launching a listening exercise in the NHS and we've got in America

people who haven't yet been officially confirmed in Trump's cabinet already launching crowdsourcing for ideas in their departments.

Well I thought poor so poor West Streeting launched this consultation exercise which he had to then immediately go and defend.

Yeah.

And he put a list out of things that he said were genuinely useful with the comment, admittedly, these aren't as funny as the suggestion to replace ambulance sirens with Danny Dyer shouting Ninor, but this is this exercise is well worth it.

Yes, and what do you expect if a politician says to the general public who use social media, I want to hear your ideas?

What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the ones that were in the public consultation were Thunderbird 2 style detachable pods in ambulances.

Then it was sending cinemas into mental health wards.

Bring back clapping, someone said.

We saved the NHS by clapping during COVID.

So make everybody clap at a solid 80 beats per minute.

I mean, the zenith of popular involvement in final decision making is, of course, the naming of a lifeboat as Bolting McBoat Face.

They should have known.

I mean, there was a contest in America a while ago for what would be the new flavor of Mountain Dew, which is one of the more aggressively coloured sodas.

And people, I think the top win, it was rigged by a Reddit, I think, or another website.

So one of the top ones was diabetes.

Okay.

So they should have known what was coming.

If you say anything you want, the public, anything you want.

Anthrax light.

Exactly.

So after the Balty McBrow face, debacle, debacle face,

why are we still doing that?

And going to America, is it part of, because I notice those calling for crowdsourcing of ideas, crowdsourcing of nominations for people to be employed within government departments are the social media barons.

It's Ellen Musk and Ramaswamy who have both been put in charge of Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency.

Now, yes.

Yes.

And this morning I sent you an email with a picture of a dog in it.

What did you make of that picture of the dog?

I was wondering why you were sending me a picture of a dog, really.

My instant reaction is, is Helen a bot?

Well, maybe.

Maybe I just don't know it yet.

But

that is the original Doge dog.

Right.

So now, about a decade ago, there was a Shiba Inyu, a very beautiful Japanese dog, very kind of like one of those dogs that looks kind of fat, but isn't.

It's all just fur, like a very cute dog.

And it became a meme

as a way of saying the word dog, but in a kind of cute way.

You'd also maybe say small bean and things like that.

So it was very...

I keep forgetting I'm several decades older than you.

No, no, you just haven't spent your entire adult life on stupid forums, learning stupid things that will one day come useful because Elon Musk also spends his life on stupid forums.

But the dog, you would put things like such whatever, much whatever, wow.

So it'd be like such government inefficiency, much union busting, wow.

Anyway, the really sad thing is the original dog is now dead.

Dead.

That's how.

It's a dead doge.

Yes.

That's how old it was.

It did also provide a lot of...

I mean, I went to the National Gallery where they've got one of the paintings of original Venetian Doge.

and they have missed a trick by not also having the new Doge.

But, um, but this was this was taken up by people who ran cryptocurrencies.

So, there's Bitcoin, obviously, but there is also Dogecoin, and it became a very popular trading coin for people who just really like memes.

And that's where Elon Musk got into it.

And so, he became obsessed with Dogecoin.

He kept tweeting about how he was buying it, which made the price go up.

And so, his thing was he wanted, therefore, a department of governmental efficiency doge.

It's government by pun at the risk of opening up a massive pit into hell.

Why would Dogecoin be different from Bitcoin?

What would

these things don't exist?

No.

So why does one thing that doesn't exist differ from another?

So each cryptocurrency has got its own basically ledger of every transaction that has happened on it, right?

That's the blockchain for each industry.

And that's the blockchain.

And that's the thing that's eating up the environment.

That's the thing that's taking up lots of water and electricity, as is AI.

That's a whole separate other discussion right but but it's killing us yeah yeah carry on but i mean the really sad thing when you look into cryptocurrency is in a way does the pound and the dollar really exist yes no okay right they mostly now only exist as numbers on the screen so it's about who's willing to guarantee those things but yeah donald trump has done this very funny thing which is that he's now created a department of government efficiency and he's put two people in charge of it yes ramuswami and elon musk yeah it's already we've fallen at the first fence really haven't we there one of them should sack the other one yeah two bloated eagles in charge of bringing swingeing match all cuts to government

is not going to work, is it?

So one of them is going to.

So watch, yeah, that's.

But they're not going to, I mean, because they're both of them, you know, all mouth and no trousers, one of them presumably will bore the other one into submission or buy them off or something.

Well, yeah, one of them will turn the other into some kind of non-existent currency.

Something to look forward to there.

But it made me laugh because apparently, according to Axios, what Donald Trump has been doing in order to pick his new cabinet is getting like his staff have been preparing clips of them on TV.

So he's now evolved into his final form, which is that he's now picking people who are good at playing a politician on TV because he was very good at playing a politician on TV, and that's really how he became president.

He said that he wanted to appoint someone as defense secretary who looked like he was right out of central casting.

So he wanted someone who looked like a powerful general rather than someone who had the right level of experience, demeanor and was able to withstand international pressure.

And so this very day he's announced as his defense secretary someone who presented on Fox News for eight years.

Yeah.

And talked about defence.

Yeah, I mean a veteran, but also most known for he was once taking part in a live axe-throwing competition on television.

Already a thing you think, should you be allowed to do that?

And he managed to miss the target completely and hit the drummers behind him.

And that's the kind of nous and strategic scale he'll probably be bringing to the Pentagon.

Are we reaching then government by meme or an acceptance on the part of those who are in government that actually government can't do that much anymore?

That the forces that shape our lives

for right or wrong are other forces outside government.

It's international events, it's the tech companies,

it's these massive organisations that government subcontract out to, the Capitas and the

G4 and the

weird-sounding

Lex Luther names like Gov You Bad or

Yes, sometimes some they're just sort of syllables, aren't they?

They're like, oh no, and you're like, is that a real word?

Yeah, I think there's definitely some of that.

I also think it's nihilism, don't you think?

It's about, I mean, you know, we're analyzing political language, but it's about people who think that only really language exists.

That there is no fundamental bureaucracy might be stultifying and terrible and boring, but it does need to happen.

Somebody fundamentally needs to go and make sure maintain the critical infrastructure.

You can't just

making arguments on TV is not government, which I suppose is a bit about the difference between campaigning mode and governing mode.

Maybe politicians would rather now live just constantly in campaigning mode where it's all about promises and words than they would in the boring bit of delivery.

It's a phrase that, you know, politicians campaign in poetry and then govern in prose.

And that was always meant to acknowledge the fact that the real business of governing is actually quite hard

and quite boring.

Right, but it's the day-to-day grind.

None of them want to do that now.

They like the idea of being appointed to run a department, especially if it's like Doge or it's a meme, head of memes.

That's great.

But the actual business of then having to come in on Monday and sit down and gather your team and go, okay,

how does government work and how can we make it better and what's inefficient?

How can we get rid of it?

And how long will that take and how much will that cost?

Can somebody give me a spreadsheet?

Can somebody run up a program that will show me that, how that would unfold over the next two to three years?

No, it's give them the title, give them the headline and that's it.

After that, just take photos of yourself in the department.

This is the Liz Truss Prime Ministership and indeed cabinet career in spades because she spent quite a lot of time, I gather, as foreign secretary going to

conferences and delegations, but spending quite a bit of the day trying to fix up an Instagram photograph to show where she was.

I suppose none of us are immune to that idea that if you just say things, then they happen.

And I think that's a bit that's the other side of listening mode, isn't it?

Is that if you read diaries of ministers, they will say things like, you have to kind of go in and just have a couple of headline things you want and be kind of really difficult about it, just going, but I want this, but I want this, but I want this.

Because to some extent, as a minister, you do make things happen by saying them over and over again.

But there is a bit where you actually have to make sure that other people carry out those orders.

Yes.

And that's the bit I think that people find a bit dull.

and where their attention wanders.

And then you start retreating to the headlines like, you know, we need to make efficiency savings.

Okay, but you might have cut something that actually saves lives.

We need to deregulate.

Okay, but you might have deregulated something that actually saves lives.

Yes, there's a famous Steve Hilton once, allegedly when he was in the Cameron government as their blue skies thinker, wanted to overturn a whole load of regulations, including one that would have made it okay to sell flammable sofas.

And he was just like, that's going to be, it's one of those things that maybe we should talk about the idea of red tape nebulously.

People are very against red tape until it's the thing that stops your child being you know immolated by a sofa absolutely yeah and then it turns out red tape was actually great you should have more of that sort of thing that's that's good and even as a physical thing red tape is actually quite useful so it's you know it's actually

both literally and metaphorically it's not the thing to denigrate because it's it is what keeps the country together in many respects we're talking about this in the week where the archbishop of canterbury has resigned and he made a very interesting statement that was about contrition and reflecting and learning and and accountability But I don't know how you felt about that story.

So, for the backdrop being that there was a prolific abuser of children called John Smythe, who worked at various Christian summer camps, at which Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, also worked.

There was a report into the abuse that he was whipping boys there in 1982.

Somehow it fell down a manhole until 2013 when it was refound again.

And Justin Welby resigned, saying, I take responsibility for the, you know, not seeing it through to the police in 2013.

but no real mention of any possibility of having her listened

earlier to that.

And that's what I mean by active listening and passive listening.

Passive listening is somebody reporting somebody this and you acknowledging it.

And then somebody described his actions as incurious.

I heard Al Gore describe George W.

Bush as incurious after the Iraq.

Someone who didn't ask the right questions.

Paula Vennels at the post office was accused of being incurious.

I mean it sounds quite meek as a phrase, but it's one of those words that actually

really pinpoints a significant failing.

I remember Paula Venels saying about the post office that she wanted to protect the reputation of the post office, which implies that reputation is this pre-existing thing.

We love post offices.

They're nice.

They're in the village.

Reputation is the sort of sum total of its behaviour.

I imagine.

You protect a reputation by making sure its behaviour and the behaviour of those people who run it is the best it can be.

Well, that reminds me of the fact that one of the great architects of listening exercises must be HR departments, corporate HR departments, which, you know, are sometimes set up to protect the institution, not the employer.

So if you go to them and they hear your complaint, their question is not how can we help you, but how can we make sure that this doesn't explode in our faces?

Well, you can, yeah, I mentioned the post-office CFE scandal, Partygate.

It's amazing how you can actually watch unfold in front of you a regular pattern of behavior, which is...

Well, Boris Johnson managed to not hear a party that was happening in his own house.

The man, he simply cannot hear the frequencies that ABBA used.

He's lost that bit of his hearing.

It's all the Latin spurring around his head.

It sort of cancels out the voice of popular culture.

But there's a playbook, isn't there?

Yeah, there is, which is, you know, we hear allegations.

The first thing to do is say, that's appalling.

It's not who we are.

It's not who we are.

And we will, of course, the health, the well-being of those who work for us, who use us, or whoever, is of primary importance.

Sometimes that's it.

When they get nudged by people saying, you haven't done anything about this, they now go, of course.

And it is, of course, that we look into this.

So they'll then launch an internal inquiry.

They'll have the internal inquiry.

And then the next phase, and you can look it up in every, you know, you can look it up with the anti-Semitism debate in Labour, partygate post office bbc salvo everything and they say well we've had the inquiry now and we're going to learn the lessons from it once the internal inquiry is shown and actually reveals much more significant failings than anyone ever admitted to they then issue another apology saying well we're going on a journey here again this is not where we want to be now and this is this makes uncomfortable reading and so they then have to have an independent inquiry there's then a huge shouting match about who leads the independent inquiry.

They usually lose that, but on certain occasions they can win it.

And then that independent inquiry inevitably reveals what everyone had an inkling of for the last 30 years.

I love it.

When you mention that phrase, this is not who we are.

Yeah.

It's always such a great phrase of somebody saying, you know, I know I may have murdered all those kittens, but this is not who I am.

Yeah, it is not a reflection.

I mean, you speak to people who knew me the other days

when I was just running a shoe shop.

You know, the journey is used there really as a way of explaining why this thing has now taken 20 years.

But also listening is a kind of substitute for action in the sense that if you've been listened to, you're supposed to then feel better about it.

And, you know, having spoken to various victims of things that have happened in inquiries, actually being heard is really important to those people.

There is a kind of just being acknowledged that something terrible happened to you and that no one's trying to cover it up is powerful.

But often what happens is that the listening phase lasts so long until everybody who was in charge at the time has either left government government or died.

Yeah.

And I think that is why people feel quite, maybe, quite cynical about the idea of listening, because you're listening for so long.

Yes.

And, you know, if you were responsible as the head of an organization, you would be listening properly, and therefore you'd be working out what is it you're listening to.

Are you listening to an individual or are you hearing what amounts to a scream?

And if you heard a scream, you would respond, wouldn't you?

And it's the inability to identify that,

whether it's through the tactics of listening to people individually and not telling them that there are many more like them, so that there's no composite sound or expression that's coming the way of the organization, or whether you are tone deaf.

There's a thing that startups sometimes do, which is called a pre-mortem, as in the opposite

of a post-mortem, which is if our company collapses, what will have caused it to collapse?

Yes.

And that's a version of the listening exercise that probably is quite a good one, right?

Because it's like, who should we be listening to now?

Yeah.

That we could listen to in five years time and go i wish we'd listened to them yeah and you maybe maybe actually bring that forward and listen to them now when it can do some do some good i do want to look at other aspects of listening because um having worked in america with tv executives and agents and studios and so on there is very much um a way of listening that they have over there which is to not want to commit

to a response to the listening.

So it's a way of politely hearing what you have to say and then sounding as if they're making a decision.

So I think the only way I can do this is by demonstrating it.

So could you ask me to do something specific, like, you know, build a wall or, you know, choose something.

Very, very specific.

Okay.

Yeah.

Armando, can you build me a wall?

Well,

that's a conversation we're going to have to have.

And I very much look forward to having that because I think we really ought to have a conversation about that.

Yes.

Okay, but I've got a shipload of bricks arriving tomorrow.

Okay, I hear you.

But I think that could be folded in.

I mean, we could talk about the conversation now

and then I could get back to, you know, I could pass on what you have to say.

I could pass that on to the meeting that I think we have to have.

I just think we have to have the, I think that's a com you know, and it goes on like that.

I don't know how this hasn't driven you mad, but it can.

It has.

We wrote a character in Veep who...

It was Selena's closest friend who she brought in to help run the campaign.

And then she realises, oh, my God, that's how she's been speaking to me for the last 30 years but that's the same that's the version of the trump thing isn't it which is that you think that well the world exists in the realm of pure language nothing actually ever needs to actually happen as long as people having conversations about

seriously considering that he is a meme you know and and it that when he was shot his action wasn't get me to the hospital it was someone's taking my shoes off put them back on please now i want to stand up could you clear clear away from me i know that gives me another clean line from the shooter but i actually want to face the cameras while I stick my fist up and shout, fight, fight.

Right, I've done that.

Now take me to the hospital.

You know, his instant reaction in microseconds was, how can I turn this into a meme?

How can I turn this into the defining visual moment of the campaign that people will see and then go, oh, well, he's won.

I mean, I don't think there's any pause for thought or pause for calculation.

I think it's instantaneous though.

That's an instinctive thing.

Now, usually before we sign off, we look at a few other words that have come our way.

Have you brought something caught your ear in the way that something caught Donald Trump's ear?

I'll shut up.

I'm going to stop now.

I've been listening.

I've been listening to our listeners.

That's how, you know, the split.

Hello.

Hello, listeners.

Jordan Hackney wrote in to say he would like to nominate Tsar.

Ah.

So Trump has just nominated a border czar.

Kamala Harris was allegedly a border czar.

There are a lot of, there's a night czar for London who seems to have closed down most of London's nightlife.

That's what she seems to have done in that.

And it has, I have to say, it is one of those phrases that has always made me wonder the last czar of russia notoriously was shot with his entire family in a basement yes and then they had 50 years of communism it's not a great precedent for what people are going to do my first reaction was you know obviously we're going to have to deal with putins so we should appoint a russian czar um

we could finally usurp him finally restore the romanovs uh well there we go that's my um that's my nomination for the world and it's been around for a while the czar hasn't it it's uh i think pre-blair i think actually i'm gonna say i'd like to go and find out who the first czar was, but I think it's about sort of in 1300.

Actually, I think it was under John Major when he had a Cohn's hotline where you could ring up and complain about traffic cones.

I think there was a Cohn's czar, which uh I would love to know what the small

banal, pathetic thing you could be a czar of is with like paperclips.

Stationary czar.

Coming home from work, really excited.

Darling, I've had a promotion.

What are you?

Stationary czar.

Do you know what?

But before it, it was Supremo.

Supremo.

We We don't get Supremos now.

Maybe it's because it sounds too male.

I don't know.

But it's so, yeah, you were.

Yeah, Suprema sounds like a brand of cream, doesn't it?

So, yeah,

or sort of dog food or something.

Yeah, or an energy drink.

Yeah.

Okay, well, I'm going to be podcast Suprema, and you can be.

I'll be WordZar.

You can be WordZar.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back sometime next week.

That's all for now.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Daro Breen.

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