The coronavirus and the future of democracy

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris Oh, so good, Scott. Actually, I'm a little tired today, because we were up late last night.

Scott Yeah, well, late for you. I'm a little tired, too, for some reason. I don't know why, because I'm Eastern Standard Time. We have our second guest ever on the podcast, Harry Pierce, who's also in the show MI5. That's true. Spooks. It's also called Spooks. It's about spies. The main character, the guy who ran the one unit of MI5 was called Harry Pierce. I didn't know that you're on TV.

Harry No, well, I mean, he's my namesake. There's a slight difference in spelling. He's P-E-A-R-C-E, and I'm with an S. Oh, so that's your undercover. Yeah, deep cover. But he was a character in Spooks who managed not to get knocked off in a show that was incredibly good at knocking off his characters.

Chris And you work... I don't have time for a trash TV. Oh, you're so deep, that's why. I have time for Tiger King, you know, I have time for The Last Dance.

Scott Harry, you co-lead or you're a part of and help run the Center for the Future of Democracy. And Chris sent me a piece she wrote, which I thought was outstanding. He brought to my attention called Let's Talk COVID. And this is something in the US I've seen. Basically, if I get the gist of the piece, you're saying that... Look, we need kind of more consent of the governed for public policy. We can't just say the scientists are telling us we're going to do this and we're going to do it because if that's the way policy works out, like it's seeming to play out in the UK and in the United States, it creates this backlash where people feel like they're prisoners. Well, the scientists say this, so we have to lock down. And you kind of offer a different model where we would use sampling and some other techniques to get more consent of the government, to get people to actually weigh in and shape decisions on complex issues like COVID-19. Is that like a fair summary of the piece?

Harry Yeah, I think that the wave of measures that coalesced in lockdowns in the UK or America or wherever were interesting to the extent that they were... They were applied very quickly in some cases and they applied to almost everyone and they didn't really seek much legislative scrutiny or indeed public engagement. And I think that the reason that more or less people have been content with that arrangement to date... And we can all see, kind of look left, look right on the street, we're all stuck indoors and that kind of builds social tolerance to it, yeah. Exactly. And the next phase of the COVID measures, which will be various degrees of unlocking, resulting in the end in a total reversal of the lockdowns, will, in their partiality, affect some people at some time, some people in others, and will affect us in different ways. And I think at that point,

at the point where politics and the measures taken in response to COVID begin to redefine the community, the large community that we live in, and to divide people, The consent of the people who will be affected by those policies in various ways will need to be considered and taken into account to a far greater degree.

Chris Can I just jump in on that there to kind of connect what is why I loved your piece and said, Scott, we got to sit down with Harry and just kind of tease this out a bit is, you know, so the last four to six weeks or so, I've been involved. Involved is too strong a word. I've kind of been like, you know, peering in like a kid in the candy store to the kind of Policy and decision-making models that big state governments are putting together, that international institutions like the World Bank are putting together to help senior decision-makers, policymakers decide, okay, basically, what do we reopen and how fast do we reopen? And they've got these fantastic models that Rely upon and presume that there's going to be a lot of real-time data available about the state of our healthcare system, about You know, at a kind of sector by sector level, how important is this sector to the economy and how able is this sector going to be to get back to work in a way that is sensitive to social distancing and stuff like that?

And all of it makes tremendous sense, but I've always felt just looking at it that there is this glaring giant piece of the dashboard missing, which is will people accept this? And I think you're totally right. There is just a mountain of analytic work intended to drive decision-making happening right now that isn't considering the consent question at all. And I'm really quite worried about that.

Harry Yeah, I mean, it's a question of consent and the rights of political communities to have a say over the decisions that affect them. But I think it's also worth pointing out that we're living in a time in which scientific and other expertise is being explicitly brought to bear on policymaking. But it's not the case that science speaks in one voice, that it is self-evidently one thing over another, and that it can be followed in a way that many governments claim that it can be. So whenever we have a public health measure or piece of legislation that purports to be following the science, what it's doing is it's taking elements of science interpreted one way over another. And at the expense of other pieces of science. And marrying that information with a bunch of value decisions about the value of life, say, about security, about liberty, about rights, about obligation, and is making policy through an amalgamation of those things.

So it's also important to remember that decisions which bundle all of those things together are not exclusively the preserve of scientists. The decisions in those veins must be contributed to by scientists for sure, but also policy makers, civil servants, but also fundamentally, I think, the people for whom those decisions will apply most directly.

Scott And don't you think when people don't understand that they vacillate between two extremes, they either have a dogmatic confidence In the scientific establishment that's shaping the policy. Or they become cynical and skeptical, as if the science is completely arbitrary, right? If you don't understand the nuance you're talking about, it seems that, at least in the United States, people wind up on one end or the other, those kind of polar extremes.

Harry Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to a general confusion that democracies still have with regards to expertise and scientific expertise, perhaps, in particular. And that's that we don't know whether Well, so on the one hand, as you say, there's the view that we ought to just follow this thing which is capable of producing knowledge that is true. The problem with that is that that isn't in fact what science does. It's a bunch of contested claims and it's contributed to by a bunch of different equally contingent forms of knowledge. The other problem with it is that if you do accept that, then politicians can completely avoid responsibility and culpability when things go wrong. They can simply blame scientists. An alternative way of engaging with expertise is to bring it into the political realm itself. And make scientists political actors sort of in competition with all the other ones. The problem with that obviously is that experts don't want to be politicized in that way. So I think democracies are going to have to work out how they engage with expertise and, to put it more pointedly, how democratic legitimacy interacts with expert judgment.

I don't know exactly how the best way to do that is, but one way would be, as I argue in the piece that you refer to, to set up more deliberative forms of democratic engagement in which experts and citizens discussed questions together and expert judgment could then be brought to bear on political decisions without running the risk of a being scapegoated or b being politicized, as well as citizens being able to contribute to questions. The answers of which will affect their lives.

Scott I'm shocked in the United States how the mostly folks in the center left went from completely deferential, a completely deferential posture to the distancing and to the kind of measures that were, you know, the stay at home, shelter in place and stuff, to all of a sudden it's like there's no COVID anymore. Everybody's out protesting. Thanks for watching. The center-left just decided, yeah, this is more important. And I'm not saying that's illegitimate. They said, look, there's an injustice here. It's severe. And that kind of just overshadowed or at least it relativized the public health concern. And in some ways, like... In an informal, deliberative way, the public just chose priorities. It went from one priority to the other. I take it what you're saying is, wow, what if we could frame that in a more deliberative, intentional way so that we could weigh priorities and things like that, which it doesn't seem like we've done up to this point in the pandemic.

Chris There must be... And I wonder if you've got sort of a bunch of eager doctoral students in the Center for the Future of Democracy who are working on this right now. But like this is just such a wonderful moment if I'm researching a thesis on kind of, you know, the role of reason in contemporary democracy. Because it seems to me that like all of our worst nightmares about what we've kind of fudged over, In terms of how rational thought fits into our theory of why we think democracy is kind of a good way to run the world, are kind of being exposed in this crisis. I need to go and do some background reading on your piece, Harry, because you quote this work by this Yale professor, Dan Cahan, who basically, I guess, found that the more educated you are, there's no clear correlation between how educated you are and how much, quote-unquote, science is informing your Your political views, it seems, if I'm reading it right, the more educated you are, the more polarized you are.

Scott It puts you better at confirmation bias. You get more educated and you get better sources.

Chris I'll just sort of throw another piece on the table. I don't know how all these pieces fit together, but this idea that somehow... The solution, and it's the long-term solution, is we've got to figure out how to better kind of integrate science and the experts into the discourse because it does seem like, you know, we've kind of set up this model where like there are, I guess, those people over there who are experts and they can speak at us when we require it or when we welcome it. But it's not like there is no integrated understanding of the powers and the limitations of expertise. That expertise doesn't mean that there is a kind of blueprint understanding of the world. It means better informed about some things, but also means maybe Experts have a harder time understanding this stuff outside of their area of expertise, right? And so

if you're going to have experts make decisions, you need to have multiple experts to kind of represent the data. I'm going to stop rambling, but I feel like there is this... One of the things I think is becoming obvious at the moment is how badly integrated into society the expert is.

Harry Yeah, I think you're right and I think in many instances it comes down to the nature and the style of communication. So it used to be thought in scientific and policymaking circles that in order to get a population infused by or at least interested in Thank you very much. The implication being that people don't like things, they don't subscribe to things or agree with things if they don't understand them or they don't know anything about them. And this was called the deficit model of scientific communication. People don't know very much, you tell them more about a particular thing, they are then more in favour of that particular thing. And study after study after study has disproved this as a way of doing scientific communication. It's simply not the case. That the more you tell people about things, the more they have a quote unquote rational attitude towards that thing. They're not necessarily, you know, giving people more information about something won't necessarily generate consensus on that particular thing. And the work that you referenced by Dan Kahan is really persuasive. And it shows that The more educated and the more numerical and scientific literacy you have, which are proxies for reasoning capacity. The more you have of those things doesn't mean that you'll end up being more concerned about climate change, for example.

So it's not simply the case that to get people behind certain climate action, you can simply tell them more about the nature of the problem and the implications of not doing anything about it. It's not that people don't know those things that prevents them from thinking the thing that you want them to think. Interesting.

Chris So Al Gore's whole inconvenient truth This is so big, right? Because there is, I think, a broadly held assumption that there is a relationship between, very broadly, education, And thinking the right way.

Scott Do you guys know Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow? The psychologist. I remember they would do these experiments. And these are educated people in universities. They would have them spin a wheel, a random wheel with numbers on it, and then ask them, how many countries do you think are on the continent of Africa? The higher the number they spun, the higher the number of countries they guessed. I mean, just think about those kinds of studies, all those kinds of studies they would do that we are just so, you know, like, you know, and that's the point, right? We all make all these, we can't deliberate about everything, right? So, we make all these snap judgments, which evolutionarily we have to be able to do to survive. But I think from the deliberative democracy standpoint, it makes, we need more slow thinking, not fast thinking, right? We need our brain to slow down and consider things rather than just react.

Harry And I think we've also got to remember that political questions tend not to admit of technically right or technically wrong answers. They tend to admit of a variety of value-laden answers. So one of the things that is important about deliberative forms of democracy It's that they can get away from the technocratic idea that there is a right answer to certain questions and it's the job of politics simply to uncover that answer. And with a model that works in that way, the people who are trained to unpack these things and uncover certain answers within certain disciplinary parameters, i.e. experts, are the people who by implication ought to be taking decisions on everyone's behalf. Whereas if we acknowledge the fact that we can answer political questions in a number of different ways, however we answer them, we will be importing and negotiating between different value judgments, as well, hopefully, as certain factual claims and arguments.

Then it behooves us to involve as many people as possible in coming to those sorts of answers. And they may or may not be the most technocratically efficient answers, but by virtue of the fact that they involve a bunch of different people, they canvass and at least seek to reflect a bunch of different interests, they'll be more consensual, more practicable, and probably seem to be more legitimate than simply saying, this is the right answer, this is therefore what we ought to do.

Chris Sorry, I got to jump in here again because I love your kind of critique of maybe the classic notion of deliberative democracy. So maybe let me do 101 for myself. As I understand it, I think of representative democracy as, okay, I'm going to vote for you, Harry. So you go think about these problems. Yeah, exactly. And I'm going to go and focus on sort of my other stuff. That's representation. And then deliberative democracy is kind of like, no, no, no, you can't offload it all to Harry, your elected official. You have to be a participant as a citizen in some of these important value-laden choices that are going to get made. But I like how in your piece, I totally recognize this is just sort of a draft, so really happy that you shared it with us so we can kind of tear it apart a bit. But that kind of, you know, the classic way of doing deliberative democracy is to say, okay, let's kind of, let's construct a representative sample of ordinary people. To deliberate, you know, and we, the experts, we will implant in their brains the right information. And then we will let them do this messy black box thing of value weighing against one anotherness and spit back at us, hopefully the right answer.

Hopefully the right answer, which then we can kind of go back and say, see? And what I love is that you then tear that apart and say, you know, well, I think the best way to do this is to include lay people and experts, which is like the fundamental error we're making there is this notion of expertise and lay as kind of, you know, A division between holders of truth and holders of value. And that if we ever want deliberative democracy to be something more than a kind of political buy-in exercise, we've got to let go of that comforting simplification and everybody get their hands a bit dirtier.

Harry Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, I think the conventional defense of deliberative democracy says that, or says something along the lines of, if you get, as you say, a representative sample of people, you put them in, or you give them discursive conditions that are fair and equal and open, and if you encourage them to interact with one another fairly and rationally, whatever that might mean to you. You are likely, so the defenders of deliberative democracy say, to generate consensus, generate more rational judgments, generate more other-regarding sentiments, something along those lines. As the work of someone like Dan Kahan demonstrates, that won't necessarily happen. You can give people more information, you can encourage them to express themselves rationally, all these sorts of things, and you don't necessarily get a convergence of opinion or a quote-unquote rational judgment. Instead, therefore, I think in some instances, deliberative democracy and these deliberative democratic exercises like citizens' juries and citizens' assemblies should be redesigned to emphasize slightly different things. So rather than seeking to change people's opinions or generate a rational consensus or to access some version of what you might describe a common good, all things which are incredibly difficult to do.

You should structure deliberative exercises so they maximize certain political attributes like inclusion and like the opportunity to participate. And one way that you might do that is to, rather than just getting a bunch of citizens to talk to one another, get those citizens and also get some experts, some policymakers, some politicians, some people in authority. And get these different groups to exchange ideas with one another and try and see, try and understand an issue from a variety of perspectives.

Scott It's interesting you said this. I have a friend who is visiting some family in Tennessee. He lives in Philadelphia. He's probably in his... He's like, in Tennessee, it's not like that. They're much more relaxed. And he said, just being there changed his perspective on the world. He's like, my anxiety level drops, my, you know, like, I just, my whole, like, you know, I'm still a little careful, you know, like, I'm still kind of doing a little bit of distancing because, you know, I'm a little concerned. But it was just interesting how his whole consciousness changed. By being in a culture that had a much more relaxed and sort of permissive approach to how people should deal with the virus, it's interesting that what you're saying Why I bring that up is you've got these people on different ends of the spectrum around fear, around expertise, around how much they want to defer to science and public policy, how much individual liberty they're valuing. And in this country, it's a pretty big country, and it's a pretty broad sample across the spectrum.

We're not going to get a vaccine at any time in the near future, I don't think. We're going to have to do exactly what you're saying as a country. We're going to have to figure out how do we share risks together. You're right. The experts just can't tell us that. We're going to have to, as citizens, say, this is the kind of risks we're willing to take as individuals. These are things we can leave up to personal responsibility. These are things maybe we need to have certain sort of public sector kind of I think what you're saying, there's no perfect answer to that. It'll come through the consent of the governed and the wider consent model we build, the more governable the culture is going to be.

Harry Yeah, and there's a kind of hard-nosed efficacy argument here as well. So, for example, contact tracing will presumably feature or be a feature of whatever type or degree of unlocking takes place, say, here in the UK. Now, it's obviously not up to laypeople to technically devise the contact tracing system. That would be completely ludicrous. There are people who can bring their expert knowledge and understanding to bear. On the other hand, it would be completely pointless in a way to devise a particular technology that was broadly considered by the public to be either morally unacceptable or which in some way clashed with or undermined their capacity to live the life that they expect or want to lead. So in that instance, you have two different bodies of knowledge. You have the kind of technical knowledge that would go into devising a socially useful technology. And then there's the kind of social and the practical knowledge

that sets the boundaries of what is acceptable to those people. If you don't marry those two together, You're going to have a pretty crappy policy. So both of them need to be leveraged in order to devise, well, in this case, public health policy, which can be destroyed.

Scott So kind of what the summary statement there would be, right? Like the technical experts can tell us what we can do. But they can't tell us what we should do. The can is provided by the experts, but the should or the ought has to be provided by the public consensus, or it's not going to be something that, again, consent of the governed kind of issues.

Chris Here's a question just on the contact tracing. Are either of you worried about, will the privacy concerns prevent An effective contact tracing ecosystem or app from rolling out? Are you worried that the privacy issues are going to be... Thank you very much. Our digital lives, how frustrated I am that I have to click, yes, I accept every time I go to a website now that there's all these GDPR protections in Europe. I just accept, accept, accept, accept almost all the time. My rights have been protected, but I don't value my privacy anymore. You know, my friends in China with contact tracing apps. So it's not like you were required to. But if you wanted to go to a cafe, if you wanted to go to a 7-Eleven, if you wanted to go anywhere and do anything at the door, they wanted to see, you know, whether your app status was green. And you could choose to install that app or not. But only if you did, did you have the privileges

Harry I'm a bit of a Luddite. So the way I safely interact with technology is to send emails and use Word documents and anything beyond that gets me kind of flustered. So I tend to give it a bit of a wide berth. So I don't really know anything about the contact tracing technology. I mean, just broadly speaking, And really, this is broad. I mean, my attitude to any form of technology really is that it really depends how it's used and how it's deployed. There are very obvious potential health benefits to deploying certain technologies and allowing us to open up in a certain way safely. And if technology can be leveraged to that end, That seems like a relatively good thing to me. On the other hand, you hear all these kind of horrible premonitions about under the skin technology that might help us unlock in a more

judicious fashion, but could be repurposed later to tell whether you are having an angry reaction to a political speech that you're watching online. That would obviously be quite a lot worse. I know nothing about how these things work, how the information is gathered and stored and used.

Scott I think that doesn't sound... Thanks for watching! On regulating social media companies and things like that, and privacy issues, which is the ironic thing. Because, I mean, I feel like we make a bigger kind of deal of it culturally. We argue about these kinds of things. And yet, we have not been at all as sort of aggressive as Europe in actually doing some regulations for people's privacy, which is... I don't know why that is.

Chris My first hypothesis would be to check lobbying. But I'm a cynic. How much are Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft spending to give themselves a good environment to operate in? Can I shift topic just a bit and get back to deliberative democracy and this idea of You know, bringing the experts and the lay citizen together. I mean, my anecdotal data point with, you know, the series of social experiments called Basecamp that we've been running is that from the lay citizen perspective, there's a real hunger for this. I think the lay citizen wants and has no idea how, but would love to be In a kind of deliberative space with, say, a political leader, where there was a chance to somehow have a conversation that didn't feel like you were just being spoken at, but actually felt like I could form a more human connection of mutual Talking and listening, which feels like that would be amazing and just feels completely absent. And similarly with the expert, the chance to talk to a public health professional and talk about what do we mean when we talk about health and well-being and for it not just to be a one-sided affair. But to be a real conversation where somehow both come away from it richer.

And then, you know, like business leaders. So, you know, and it's hard to find sometimes the partner on the expert side. If there's a power dichotomy, sort of the powerful and the one with less power in the relationship, it's hard to find the powerful who wants to go into this environment. But sometimes you get lucky. And I have a friend who is the CEO of a major sort of infrastructure company. And in the midst of this COVID crisis, he's really starting to ask fundamental questions about the whole corporate form, the limited liability corporation. Because what this whole episode has really exposed to him is just when you're thinking about your share price, when you're thinking about your shareholders, There is just a limit to how far-term your thinking, your risk evaluations can really be, how broadly you can really take stakeholder interests on board. Here is someone who has quite soberly come to a realization that I have no idea what could possibly lie behind the current corporate form, but I do start to wonder, could we do better? And what could that look like? And would love to get into a conversation with not just sort of fellow chief executives, but with a kind of a broader group of people concerned and interested in that question. And I think as soon as we start to imagine like, okay, let's create that forum.

I've been part of trying to create it. The devil is in everything in most of our lived experiences, political, social, power dynamics, comes into that room to frustrate it. It's really hard to do. It's really hard to leave the title at the door, leave the ego at the door, leave all of my grievances at the door, and build something together, even though intellectually it feels like such a powerful possibility.

Harry Conventionally, deliberative exercises are structured so that experts are brought in to brief an apparently benighted lay public. That now informed lay public goes off to talk about something and then returns with a bunch of conclusions or recommendations. I mean, I think that that model could be hugely improved by actually getting experts and lay people to interact with one another. And as you alluded to, I think, certainly for the lay community, it would provide a potentially It's an unprecedented opportunity to feel as though those people are being listened to and considered, that their views have value, and that they are meaningful members of a political community. One of the reasons I'm interested in that sort of deliberative model is that, in a political context at least, it's been very rarely, if ever, tested. So we're not really sure what it would mean for people to be consulted in this way, to be listened to in this way. We just don't really know. I mean, you can imagine, though, that it would have some sort of effect on their sense of agency, their political self-efficacy. You can imagine people being more engaged in politics, maybe voting more, maybe joining political parties, maybe campaigning on the basis of a deliberative experience like that. But I think you're also right. You need to kind of energize and motivate the other side of that split, the more powerful or the group or the cohort which is in an established position of authority, so experts or policymakers. And I think that experts would be interested in doing this kind of... Thank you very much.

And it would also prevent them from being politicized in a way that scientists and experts don't want to be politicized. And if you kind of drag them into the representative democratic arena, they will become so. Whereas if you include them in deliberation with other people, expert judgment might not win the day in precisely the fashion that a technocratic expert would advise. But at the very least, that expert judgment will be brought to bear in some way on a policy decision or at least a policy discussion.

Scott I'm interested. Do you think that given – reading your paper made me think that a lot of concerns I've heard have been that, okay, With the COVID crisis, is this going to lead to sort of anti-democratic trends? Are we going to have more authoritarian kind of trends? Because, again, government, as you point out, There hasn't been much legislative action. Things are just kind of done. Your work almost makes me think the opposite. I wonder if people are going to demand more deliberative power just because people in this country are freaking out. Thank you very much.

Harry These large political communities being subject to really quite fantastically draconian measures. We all kind of took it pretty well. We've all accepted lockdown measures and we've kind of got on with things. And as I say, I think that's in part to do with the fact that there was an appreciation that something needed to be done. It needed to be quite radical and it needed to be quite timely. But I also think it had something to do with the fact that It caught us all up equally. We were all affected by this in more or less the same way. And I think the breakdown in that acceptance is in part to do with loads of things, and some of it will just be fatigue with what a very Thank you very much.

Chris Boy, it's... You know, when you're about to say something and then in your mind you see like a spider web of caveats? Oh, well. But, you know, there's going to be a correlation between how much trust people have in government and how much obedience there is to the... The rollout of kind of differentiated policies. OK, you can go back to work, Scott, but Harry, you have to stay at home. And, you know, I think, again, at the China example, you know, and there is this coercion element to it. Absolutely. And people have learned to obey. The public authority. But there is also, in part because of the very effective control of just the communication space, there is a strong kind of trust in government. And if I can't go back to work but Scott can, there's a good reason for this. And we all kind of go, we just keep going along with it.

You know, I would hypothesize that in Canada, you know, peace, order, and good government, it's in our constitution. There will be a lot of grumbling, but quite a bit of going along with it. Like, oh yeah, this is what it's got to be, this is what it's got to be. And, you know, like political leaders of every stripe are kind of basically all...

Scott I was shocked to me. You just wouldn't have that in the US. People are going to freak out.

Harry In the UK, the Dominic Cummings affair, I think, served notice on these two things. The idea that there'll be a differential. COVID. The subsequent COVID measures will affect us in different ways, but also... Just very briefly on what was the Dominic Cummings affair, for those who don't know. The Dominic Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief political advisor and the architect of both the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum and Johnson's successful general election campaign last year. And he... So he's been part of the government. Thank you very much. And then while he was in Durham, he was going on excursions to local castles and he visited his 80-year-old mom or whatever, like his mom's birthday or something.

Scott He exposed his 80-year-old mom. Yeah.

Chris No, he only did that to test his eyesight. Anyway, we won't get into that. Okay, yes, so that's the context on Dominic Cummings.

Harry And I think, and there's been a huge hoo-ha about it subsequently, well, since it's been found out that he did this. And I think... It's alerted people to the prospects of these measures affecting people differently in the future. So affecting some people, but not others. But also, Chris, as you say, it's raised the question of how much can we trust the government? And you really have to trust the government really quite a lot if you're... Political community is going to go along with incredibly illiberal policies that no one really wants to adhere to. You have to trust the government a lot if we're collectively going to manage something like that. And as soon as a government official says one thing and says that we must all do one thing and then he does precisely the opposite, trust in the government.

Scott Is this playing out on party lines in the UK? In the United States...

Harry I'm not too sure, actually. I mean, it was certainly the case at the beginning and then for some time after the lockdown that there was a general cross-party acceptance that these measures were necessary. And there was, by and large, a very high compliance rate. I think... And actually, I think I saw a survey some time ago now that said that the British population were more anxious than almost any other national community about the reversal of lockdown measures. But I think more recently, well, public opinion is now turning against the government. So Boris Johnson's government was at first Broadly, I think, supported by the British public. I think now there's the kind of the almost constant reminder that certain missteps have been taken and judgment has been slow or off by the Prime Minister and a number of his ministers. And that's now feeding into polling evidence that says that people are less and less satisfied with the government's response to the pandemic.

Chris I think I just want to offer one last sort of just thing on the table. It connects. I don't think it answers any of the questions we've been raising. But as we've been talking about the expert and the layperson, representation and deliberation, the need and the value of it, and in this COVID moment, These questions of trust and legitimacy of the people who are telling us things, experts, political leaders. I guess at a kind of human tribal level, I think the value of trying to figure out how could we create You know, these like genuinely deliberative spaces in our communities where, you know, it's not one way, but it's kind of we're all getting something out of this, is to kind of recognize that, you know, how many groups of others there really are. So, experts. Harry, you're an academic. I'm an academic. Those academic, people with advanced degrees who actually work inside universities, and now suddenly they come into my life and tell me that this is how we need to be. I don't know you. Our kids don't go to the same school. We never hang out.

We may live in the same kind of artificial political community, but I don't know you, so who are you to tell me these things? And it's the same kind of with political leaders. Like, our kids don't hang out, right? You've never invited me to your birthday party, right? We just, we live in, we may be part of the same, you know, we may have the same passport, but we live in different worlds. And this to me is a moment that, you know, where the, Were the limits of how far we can go for one another and just go with what one another says sort of come really to the fore if we've never tried to invest in crossing those boundaries?

Harry Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I suppose The only, all I'd add is a kind of, I mean, a potential counter-argument to these sorts of things, which I think is fair to an extent, is that, you know, there are some instances where political or policy decisions need to be, they're necessarily reactive, they need to be immediate. And in those situations, in kind of emergency situations, A slightly slower, a slightly more considered, a more wide-ranging, deliberative, discursive environment isn't necessarily the most plausible because something needs to happen incredibly quickly. But up to that, I would say that those instances are much fewer than you might think. You know there was in fact quite a long delay between the government knowing that COVID was an issue and then the government locking down. So it is conceivable in fact that certain deliberative exercises could have been held in that intervening period. It's certainly true to say that The government has known and has been planning for varying degrees of unlocking and that deliberative events could have been conducted in any of the periods since the lockdown. They don't take that long to convene. They can be held over several days.

So there's something in answer to the challenge, well, these things aren't really practicable. Or useful in a very time sensitive political environment. I think that's true to an extent, but there are in many, many instances, these things can be built in.

Scott Harry, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us, and I hope that your tribe of, you know, democratic, deliberative advocates increases. A wild bunch.

Harry You never invite me to those parties. Yeah, I wouldn't want too many of them, and if they hosted a party, you would be missing nothing.

Chris Thanks so much. Well, and yeah, thanks for asking the hard questions. It's been great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks.