Start the Week

06/06/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the historian Jane Shaw about the story of Mabel Barltrop: she was renamed Octavia by her followers who believed she was the daughter of God. The theatre director, Jonathan Kent, brings the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire to the stage, in the little known Ibsen play, Emperor and Galilean. Ziauddin Sardar gives his take on the Qur'an, drawing contemporary lessons from this Sacred Text on everything from power and politics, to sex and evolution. And Ross Perlin exposes the world of unpaid work, in his investigation into the deals done in the name of internships.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 06 Jun 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At Sprouts, our shelves are filled with new, exciting and delicious discoveries. For all different tastes and needs, discoveries like an oat milk that's gluten-free and sustainable. Or a quick dinner that's delicious and easy. Or perfectly ripe peaches that are local. And organic. This is that Sprouts feeling. At Sprouts, our shelves are filled with new, exciting and delicious discoveries. Like a new oat milk that's gluten-free and sustainable. This is that Sprouts feeling. Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, well we are talking about religion and politics today. Later on, Ross Perlin will tell us about one of the most controversial aspects of today's insecure and unfair jobs market for young people. The expanding world of interns who work for free in the hope, often vain, of a leg up later on. Before that, we're going to hear from Zia Sadar whose radical rereading of the Quran argues that it's a flexible, ethical text which has to be reinterpreted by every generation, topical. I have to say, in a week when the Prime Minister apparently plans to have a go at Islamic traditions which don't reflect mainstream British values. We'll hear later on about another religious clash this time in the ancient world, Eastern Roman Emperor Julian was famously an apostate. He jumped Christianity and returned the Byzantine Empire to paganism. And that's the subject of a little-known play by Ibsen which is being staged the first time in Britain at the National Theatre by Jonathan Kent. Let's start their nearer to home, indeed, at Bedford, the navel of England, where between the wars a remarkable religious community led by a self-proclaimed daughter of God. Mabel Baltrop is the subject of a new book by the priest and historian Jane Shaw. Jane, this was a community which came out of the First World War and just about lives on even now, and you had remarkable access to a treasure trove of letters and diaries and so on which tells the story. I did, yes. I discovered them about ten years ago. In fact, I went to visit them on September the 12th, 2001, at which point they asked me how I was going to preach on the second coming. And there were about five of them left then, two of them living in community, and I began to visit them and thought, "God, this is an incredibly interesting story," and at that point I'd just seen some of their printed books. And then, three or four months later, I said, "Maybe I can write about you," at which point they just took me into this incredible treasure trove of two huge late Victorian houses with every cupboard crammed with letters, papers, I mean, truly they have millions of letters there, because they all wrote all the time and diaries and home movies, yes, it's amazing. So, Mabel Boldrop herself, tell us about her. She proclaimed herself in effect a female messiah. She did. She was Vicar's widow by this time. After the first walk. Yes, her husband had died in 1906. She had set herself up as a sort of literary editor to make money to support her four children and become extremely disillusioned with church. And she read the writings of an 18th century and early 19th century prophet called Joanna Southcott, who'd claimed in 1814 she was going to give birth to a Shiloh figure, a kind of new messiah figure, was the talk of London, in fact, in 1814. And there was a group of women, lots of women still interested in Southcott, and in fact there was a revival of Southcott's writings during the war, because people began to think she might have the answers to the world's problems, yes, yes. And it's came about that a number of them gathered in Bedford and gathered around Mabel Boldrop, and one of them called Ellen Oliver had a revelation on Valentine's Day in 1919 that Mabel was indeed this Shiloh figure, and declared her that and then all the others handily had that revelation themselves, including Mabel. And they called her Octavia? They did. She was the eighth prophet in the line of prophets. Why bedside? She just happened to be living there, but of course, you know, it is an extraordinary place for religion to do with Bunyan and all kinds of other religious figures, yes. A new branch of self-regions, which helped. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I only mention that, because one of the things that this group, the Panacea Society, clearly had an extraordinary range of rules about how to live, including how to eat toast. Yes, well, the main practice of the society was to overcome your sins and feelings, to become perfect, or zero, as they sometimes said, in order to live forever, they believed they were going to live forever. None of them has yet managed that. And so part of that was confessing your sins, and that's why they made lots of confessions. And in fact, I discovered a few of the confessions, although they burnt most of them. But the other thing was to make yourself pleasant and easy to live with, and also to live in obedience to community rules, and the community rules were set by Octavia, who essentially had a very sort of upper-middle-class sense of how you should behave, exactly how you ate toast, exactly what you called a napkin, not a serviette and all of this kind of thing. This is a subject quite easy to laugh about, it has to be said, but in a world of lots and lots of different sects and so on, this was quite a successful set, quite a lot of people at its height, in terms of certainly those interested, didn't it? Yeah, yes, it had about 2,000 corresponding members in the end, and then many other people who were related to it through its healing, and at any one time there were about 70 resident members. And this is a time after the extraordinary trauma of the First World War, arguably the worst trauma this country suffered in modern times, where there were lots of groups of people looking at spiritualism and automatic writing and vegetarianism, and lots of different, I suppose you could say, cranks, but this is, why is this one particularly interesting? So I would say they're all seekers, actually, and in some ways not unlike, therefore, a kind of post-World War II, I mean I think we had it again in the 60s, there are people who are looking for an answer, and they're looking, you know, sometimes I like to say some people became socialists, some people became fascists, and a few people became panosians, because they really do want to find an answer to the world's troubles, and Octavia decides that they can bypass the world, which is why she doesn't allow any of them to vote incidentally until later, when she's frightened Stanley Baldwin won't get in. But because she's terribly conservative, but so they're really in a way trying to bypass the world by overcoming their sins and failings and living forever. And in this group of rather large semi-detached houses, they create their own little world, and the serpent is always outside, there's a series of rather dodgy and CD men who arrive, and eventually have to be expelled again. Absolutely, yeah, well in particular there was one American who came, who'd been through every possible configuration of these kinds of religious groups which are far more, you know, they're far more of them in America. He comes over, decides he should be the man who's going to rule alongside the woman who is Octavia, and sort of begins to build his power base, but also has a number of affairs with young men, and gets exposed, and sent away to New York. Now you yourself are a priest at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, what do you make of this little difficult boundary between what is, as it were, proper religion, or real religion, and groups like this? The really interesting thing for me in writing this book was to realise that the boundaries between heterodox religion and orthodox religion are pretty slight. And I say that because many of these women went to Church of England parishes on a Sunday, and of course were paneseans on weekdays, if you like. In fact Octavia made everyone be baptized and confirmed Anglican, even if they'd been baptized before in another church. And so, you know, it made me think, well, on any given Sunday, there are lots of people who might be belonging, but who knows what they're believing, and I think that's pretty, you know, it's important for us to remember that today. Yes, what's coming on that? I think it's an important question to ask, what constitutes the leap of faith too far? I mean, where does reason totally stop, and Octavia begins? Well, I think it's about whether you can question religion, partly, isn't it? I mean, she didn't really allow anyone to question, so I think any religious group that doesn't allow you to ask pretty openly, you know, what is this reasonable, what are the fruits of this, are the fruits good, or is it, in fact, making you have a rather miserable life? It's a radical teacher leader, that's a good warning signal. I think she also kind of uses rituals and rules as an instrument of power. She does, yes. And an ordinary religion does that too, so should we kind of take a stand against a ritual to some extent? No, but ritual can also be life enhancing, right? I mean, you know, traditionally, there's a way in which the Church of England particularly has seen people through the life cycle, you know, from baptism to death, through marriage and so there's something good about ritual too. Yeah, but I mean, certain rituals do become oppressive. They can be. And both Christianity and Islam are for oppressive, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. But isn't ritual what defines religion? I mean, that's what makes a group of faith is ritual. I think it is. I mean, there'd be lots of Protestants who'd say, "No, it's what you believe." But actually, I'm, you know, I'm an Anglican enough that I would say ritual is what defines religion. Yeah, it is difficult. Because the panacea society had a strange thing to do with linen, didn't they? They kind of sanctified linen and they sent it to people and hung it up and they thought this would purify. Well, she believed she had healing powers, so she breathed over this linen, they cut it up into little squares and people then put it into their water and when they drank it or applied it to their illness, you know, they cut on their arm or whatever. Which makes everybody giggle except that it's not so far removed from the rituals of mainstream religion. There are some Muslims who kind of put verses of the Quran on a piece of paper and put that in water and drink that. Yeah, absolutely. There you go. One question I had about the kind of boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy or where the panicines would fall versus more mainstream denominations is that, you know, there was an aversion to the having of children, to the building of families and I've often wondered about religious groups that don't, you know, they seem to want to perpetuate themselves, of course, you know, to sort of grow and continue. But how are you going to perpetuate yourself when there's no kind of idea of the family or having children were built in mechanisms for intergenerational transmission of the religion? I'm going to answer that in a different way, which is to say, you know, for eleven hundred years from about four hundred to fifteen hundred Christianity thought that celibacy was the greater good. So, in a way, she's only just going back to a kind of earlier tradition. But also that the end times were coming so quickly that physical reproduction didn't matter. But last week, the week before last we had, we were told the world was going to end, yeah. Yes, in California patches, just across the bay from me. Yeah, so these beliefs don't disappear. Let's turn now to much more mainstream religious ideas. Cesar's new book, Reading the Quran, produces a sort of piece by piece analysis of the text with, I would say, a very flexible, modern liberal reading of a lot of the more difficult issues about treatment of women, treatment of gay people, the way criminals should be treated and so on. But let's start, see if I could, with your description of how Muslims first come across the Quran, because the emotional aspect of that, I think, is something that a lot of non-Muslims simply don't understand. Yeah. I think most Muslims come across the Quran when they're actually very, very young, like I grew up kind of learning the Quran on my mother's knees and mother's knees, in fact, serve a very good purpose in Muslim societies. This is where most people learn to read the Quran. First of all, we simply read it, but some of us will go around, go around to memorizing it actually. So you could have people, young people by the age of 12 who totally memorize the Quran and they're known as Hafiz, those who have memorized the Quran, and it's a very easy text to memorize in that sense. So the emotional attachment to the Quran starts very early on. So when you hear some of the key phrases and text, you will be thinking back to early, warm, very strongly emotional memories. Absolutely. And also the reverence comes from it as well, almost complete reverence to some extent. Now, again, non-Muslims would believe that most people who study the Quran are taught how to read it by a hierarchy of teachers and mullers and others. A very important part of your book is that you think that Muslims have a duty to, in a sense, interpret the Quran for themselves. Absolutely. I think what happens is that Muslims are taught to read the Quran but not to understand it. I mean, they're taught to read it in original Arabic and they're taken through it. And what happens later on, when they read it on original Arabic, or in some cases they have memorized it, they think they have actually read it, but they haven't. And what happens later on is that the hierarchy, the mullah, the priests, they actually tell them what the Quran means, and the interpretation comes from the hierarchy. And people, in fact, to some extent, automatically accept that whatever the mullahs tell them, it is as though the believers themselves, the Muslim themselves, are empty vessels in which these interpretations are then poured on from the U.S. as far as what I'm arguing is that it is the responsibility of every Muslim to read the Quran themselves and try and wrestle with the text. Now, it is not an easy text to understand. I think the non-Muslims, when they pick up the copy of the Quran, they are totally perplexed because first of all, they assume it's going to be like the Bible. It's not a narrative in that sense. It's not a linear narrative. It doesn't have a conventional opening or a conventional, and it doesn't even have a chronology in that sense. It's a chopped-up text, isn't it? In a sense. In a sense. The way I like to see it, the Quran essentially is, to begin with, is sound more than anything else. People say the Quran is an epic poem, but I like to think of it as a piece of music as it were, with each note in his right place. And you wouldn't pick up Beethoven 7 or 9th, and start reading it in that sense. So listening is very, very important to be able to read. So can I just return to this business of Arabic? Because what proportion of Muslims have Arabic? But there are 1.4 billion Muslims around the world, only 300 are Arabs. But this is an important point, just because you have Arabic does not necessarily mean that you understand or in fact, can read the Quran itself. I mean, for example, some of the people with the knowledge of classical Arabic, with real grounding in Arabic, live in Saudi Arabia. And the last move there of Saudi Arabia, I thought after reading the Quran that the earth was flat, and then that the sun went around the earth. So I mean, just having Arabic is not actually good enough. You do really need to wrestle with the text and look at the context. I mean, the most important point, I think, is the context that people don't realize. But you need to do two things then. You need to be able, clearly, to understand and to read and to analyze the context. But Beethoven 7 can only be performed in Arabic, as it were. The sound is an Arabic sound. The sound is very much an Arabic sound. OK. Let's just turn to a few specific examples, give people more of a sense of how you read the Quran. One of the ones you make is that the Quran is addressed to different audiences the whole time. You have to understand the audience. So when it comes to the veil and those famous verses about the Prophet's family being veiled and screened. Yeah. But I mean, those particular verses differ very specifically to the Prophet's family. Well, the point, one of the points I'm making in my book is that you need to look at the verse and see under what context that particular verse was revealed. What was the Prophet doing? For example, the most amongst the terrorists and extremists, one of the very common verses that we will put Tara into the hearts of the believers, and they say, well, this means the Quran sanctions. Couldn't be more explicit than that. But if you look at the verse, that verse was particularly revealed during the time when the Prophet was engaged in one of his battles. And the verse refers to very specific people who were attacking him and it says that God will put Tara in their hearts so that Muslims are encouraged. So it doesn't have a universal validity. Similarly, the verses about the Prophet's wife are referred specifically to the Prophet's wife. In general, the verse about the veil, famously known as the modesty verse, is taken to mean that Muslims should veil. But even if you look at this particular verse, even in a literal sense, it reads, let me just say, the telling believing women to avert their eyes and safeguard their private parts and not to expose their attractions except what is visible. Now this specific, you don't go around flaunting your private parts and you don't have a come on look in your eyes the whole time. That's all it's saying. That's all it's saying. But look at the context. It was revealed to a society where nudity was not uncommon. I mean, during the time of the Prophet, Makkah was a pagan pilgrimage center. And most of the pagans who came to do pilgrimage, which was throughout the year, they did this pilgrimage naked. I mean, it was part of their ritual. And it was a society where fabrics were not common at all. So most women did not cover their, you know, especially did not cover their breasts. So it's very specific in that sense. But if you put the context, it really makes sense and it's got nothing to do with veil. It has got nothing to do with it. Absolutely. While we're on the theme, the other difficult verses about saying that men can strike or hit their wives if they're disobedient. Yeah, in the sense. This is very interesting. The classical commentators were very worried about this. So they said, "Well, how are we going to do that?" So the solution they came up with is that the men are allowed to strike their wife provided to use a toothpick. Right. Because they just could not conceive how hard it's got there. The word itself that's used can also mean just turn away from. Yeah, this is the point I'm making about struggling with the words. Each word in the Quran has a number of meanings. Right. And when you look at the meaning of the term, then you can say, "Well, this word could mean this," in a sense. Conventionally, the Quran, the interpretation has been very male oriented. And of course, the males will read it as a strike. You know, somebody else coming with a fresh eye could say, "Well, this word simply means turn away from." Reading your book, you know, you read through it and you think, "Well, there's not a problem there then. I can understand that." But I'm not saying you're a lone voice, but the overwhelming majority of Muslim will take the reading from the traditional teachers who are very often producing a much more conservative, much more reactionary reading. So it's you and David Cameron not side by side, but I mean, you know. Quite forbid. Yes, it is partly correct to say that I'm a minority voice, but I think my voice is increasing now. I mean, there are lots of people who are interpreting the Quran in a much more open way, lots of people emphasizing context and the context of not just the life of the Prophet, but the context of the period in which the Quran was revealed, we mustn't forget. It was revealed over the 23-year period, it's a kind of dynamic text. And I think there are lots of voices, but we haven't become a critical mess yet. Well, let's see what happens next. Jonathan Kent. But don't all religions rely on consensus? And if the interpretation of the Quran is entirely individual and personal, how then can you have a structured religion? Well, frankly, I'm personally against structured religion myself. But consensus is important. And in fact, this is how this is consensus is regarded as one of the key kind of cornerstones of Islamic law. That's how law has evolved in Muslim society. But consensus can be wrong as well. And consensus can be also against the spirit of the Quran. For example, one of the first basic things is the Quran says there's no compassion in religion. So this is the kind of straightforward injunction. There's no compassion in religion, but Islamic law on the basis of consensus as the apostates should be killed. So here you have a totally opposite, the Islamic law is totally opposite to the spirit of the Quran. So the consensus can go in a totally different direction. But I think that if individuals interpreted themselves and argued about it, we could have a more argued consensus, which is what I'm asking for. Not just the kind of conversation is what you're asking for. Well, I guess what I'm really wondering is what are your rules of adjudication? I'm thinking about Luther. You know, he said scriptural alone. You should have your own personal relationship with God. But then when people started to come up with their own interpretations of scripture, which didn't match his, he didn't like it at all and said everyone should learn from my nice catechism. I've just written. So, you know, what's the question? Well, I mean, that has been the general rule that that's what the religious scholars have said. The religious scholars have said that the individual is not qualified. The individual is not clever enough. The individual doesn't know what he or she is saying. Therefore, listen to us. And in fact, they even banned the printing of the Quran when painting first, you know, emerge in the Muslim world because they were scared that there will be lots of different interpretation. I'm arguing that as human beings, we should accept error. And there's nothing wrong with reading the Quran and making a mistake. Okay. That journey from, you know, questioning, radical questioning to kind of beetle-brode law giver is a very common journey. We'll come across it with Julian in a moment. But did you want to come in on this, Ross? Just following what both Jonathan and Jane have said, do you think there's a danger with the kind of radical dissemination and translation of the Quran into, you know, the 6, 7,000 languages of the world and kind of, you know, putting it for free in hotel rooms as happens with the Bible and in the US, the Gideon's, you know, that you will have sort of paneseans, Muslim paneseans, springing up in Bedford. We already have equivalent to Muslim paneseans and some of them have become terrorists. The thing about Octavia is that they're not into violence. But in fact, the step is, I mean, they're almost very close to it. What I'm arguing for, I mean, my reading is a very intellectual and rational reading. The question I asked Jane earlier on, you know, how far is the leap of faith too far? For me, there is only one leap of faith. That's the belief in God. Beyond that, everything is about thought, reflection and rationality. Well, let's turn to a leap of faith too far, potentially, and Julian, the apostate, who's the central figure in play by Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean, which is about to be staged by the National Theatre for the first time in the UK and the director is Jonathan Kent. Ibsen said it was his most important work, Jonathan. Well, I think because it contains all his themes, it was written absolutely at the centre. He wrote 12 of his right in Korea. He wrote 12 plays before it and 12 plays after it. It was the last of the great epics of the piergings, the brands, and but it foreshadows all the psychological, acute plays of his later career. And both themes, both extremes of his writing are contained within it, and I think that's why he felt it was his master work. When you say extremes, I mean, it was almost unperformable as originally written nine hours. Yeah. And you've brought it down to three and a half, including into four. Including into four. Which would be real sure. No, so let's turn to the subject itself. Julian the apostate is one of those names known to quite a lot of people at the sort of edge of their consciousness, but this was the Eastern Roman Emperor who was brought up as a Christian, a very fervent Christian, and then turned back to paganism. Reverted paganism, Christianity, since Constantine had been the state religion of the empire. And 60 years later, Julian reverted, as you say, to paganism. And what's interesting, if he'd not been killed, it's conceivable, as we are all children of the empire, that we would be in a pagan society. And I think Ibsen had a sort of yearning for that. That's what makes it such an interesting play. It's not simply a sort of historical saga, it's a personal play. It's a play because Ibsen felt, I think, very constrained by Norwegian Puritanism and longed for the celebration of life. Like the sappas and the nymphs and the... Well, yes, but it isn't just fine leaves in the hair. It's also about a celebration of life, and then there is an argument that Christianity is a sort of death cult. That's certainly what Julian argued. Yeah. I shall not, the great prohibitions of Christianity, whereas paganism was an acceptance and a celebration of life. And I think that's the central debate of the play. It seems to be in the play there are two stories about Julian going on simultaneously. One is the journey from questioner, challenging Christianity, challenging the death cult to somebody who then imposes his own kind of death cult on the empire and becomes a kind of autocratic and unpleasant figure. Well, I think that that's the other theme is the corruption of power and what power does. Because alongside that, it seems to me that Ibsen portrays Julian right from the beginning as an innate extremist, he's somebody who will always go to the edge. He's an extremist in his Christianity and then he becomes an extremist in his anti-Christian. So he's saying something about the nature of people who become dominant religious figures. Extreme belief, I think, yes, I think that's true. But in the same way, say, he's an ambivalent figure, he is a heroic figure, but at the same time, as you say, becomes despotic. But in the same way that say, Coriolanus is an ambiguous figure, that's what makes him such a fascinating character, I think, he's neither, he's not a saint and he's not, and nor is he, he's somebody who is on a quest. Do you think people will come to this play and go away thinking, yes, I'm thinking about the world now in a different way? Well, it's impossible to escape the resonances now in that it is set largely in the Middle East and is about a clash of faiths. And I think it does make one examine, examine a contemporary world and that's the only point in doing it. There's no point in doing it simply because it's by a great writer and it's never been done in English. It's because it has resonances for a lot of times now. How have you dealt with, I mean, even when you're cut down version, I think you've got a cast of 50. You've got battles, you've got temples crashing down, you've got extraordinary long marches, you've got, you know, crowd scenes, very hard to perform or to order stage. Yes, but that's part of the excitement of it, you know, it is a great epic and at the same time it is an examination of a personal, of a psychology. And both sides have to be, you know, showing and that's why it's only the national that would or could do this and do it in the Olivia. Fascinated to see it. It's hugely great fun to read, what did the rest of us make? I think there are a couple of other themes within the play. One is that history is meaningless. It seems to me epsilon is saying that history is meaningless. Do you think history is meaningless or can we not transcend history to some extent? I mean, the Arab Spring, for example, shows us that in fact, yes, some aspects of history can be transcendent. Yes, I think Ibsen, he wrote it in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and which was the first sort of modern war and which was in, for people of Europe, was a cataclysmic event which somehow subverted the whole notion of war being an honorable pursuit and it was the first modern war. And I think in that chaos, Ibsen began to feel that there was no controlling of events and events happened. Change, sure. Well, I was struck by the way in which Ibsen portrays the fact that Julian is a man who starts of wanting the toleration of all religions, the toleration of all beliefs. And then he comes to power and he becomes the oppressor, I mean, which is a standard story you see repeated constantly through history. Yes, I mean, I think that's true and I think that's what's acute about the play is that it's a very recognisable journey of somebody coming to liberate and ending up a press. I'm with Constantine himself, of course, who is remembered and indeed revered, particularly in the Greek world, I think, still as the man who brought Christianity to the empire but also boiled his life, wife alive in the bath, which wasn't attractive anyway, poisoned his son. Also, I mean, there's a kind of tension between philosophy and religion, I think it is very, very important. I mean, I think that doesn't Julian say in one place that Christianity is killing Greek philosophy or worse of this effect. Jonathan, is there any scope in the play for the possibility that Julian might succeed or have succeeded, either in the script or in the way you stage it? Obviously it's a historical drama where everybody knows what happens, the empire goes back to Christianity, but is there any idea that an individual like Julian could have changed the course of history, the course of religions, as a political figure? Well, I think that should be the hope of it, certainly of the beginning of the play, is he goes on his journey to liberate, to allow people to live in the here and now, rather than with the possibility of things being better after death. I think that that is what an audience should feel is a possibility. Of course, it unfortunately goes south. Let's turn to the here and now to another political issue, very different though, which Ross Perlin has been writing about, and that's the business of interns, you call your book Ross, Intern Nation, how to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy. Now internships, for those who don't know, are the practice of young people after university or before university, going to work for a company to get something on the CV and not being paid for it. Let's start with looking at where internships came from because I don't think anybody in this side of the Atlantic knows that. Apprenticeships have obviously existed for thousands of years, going back to the code of Hammurabi and of course in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, there have been this idea of apprentices. You looked after the apprentices and you paid them and you fed them. Right, it was almost a kind of familial relationship, you lived with your master or the master allowed the apprentice to live with them. It was kind of a long-term relationship, often five, seven years. The internship is something kind of fundamentally different. It comes from the medical profession in America in the late 19th century, taking this word from French actually, Intern, to talk about young doctors who basically just finished medical school and are moving into the profession. And it had that very specific usage just in the medical profession up until really into the 1950s, 1960s. And then after that, and really especially in the last three decades or so, has just spread into every corner of the white collar world. Starts with politics and in Washington as interns become people who work alongside the staff of a senator or congressman. The first place that sort of copies the medical model of the idea of internships is Washington, D.C., which is now a notorious internship capital. However bad you might think Westminster is, Congress, Capitol Hill in the States is much worse. I mean thousands upon thousands of interns just there, sort of serving Congress unpaid. But then it spreads into corporate America, then it spreads into every field you can think of, everything from Hollywood to journalism. And in this country, and we're relatively late to the game, but in this country, virtually every major company, every bank, every newspaper, corporations of all kinds, have interns. And these are young, ambitious, optimistic people who quite quickly realize that they're not getting any money and there's a sort of corrupt deal, you suggest, being offered to them. Well, I think the older idea of work experience as it existed here in the UK, often very brief stints, maybe a week or two, almost being a fly on the wall, just sort of seeing how an office operated, is giving way more to this American notion of multiple months working unpaid, doing serious work for organizations, often without any rights in the workplace. They're sort of there as a kind of peon for people to give work to, replacing or displacing full-time workers. And what they're hoping, the reason they're prepared to be a peon, is that they think that maybe, either because the CV is better or because they made the contact with that company, it will translate into a real job. So they've been given a leg up. It's a kind of unspoken barter deal right in the heart of the modern economy. There's this understanding that's out there that, yes, I'll get the coffee, I'll make the copies, and do that sort of thing, and at the end of it, somehow it'll all work out for me. And to some extent, it used to work that way, early on in the history of internships a few decades ago. There often was a full-time job waiting for you at the end of it, but now people are having to do three, four, five, six of these things or more. And then because there's nothing at the end of it, aren't they? There's often nothing at the end of it. I mean, you may, you know, you have something to put on your CV, that kind of thing. So this allows companies basically to get work for free, and so it's unfair on the interns, but it's also unfair on all the people who can't become interns don't make those contacts because they haven't got the connections. The internship issue is a kind of curious mixture of exploitation on the one hand and privilege on the other, because the people who can afford to do these internships are, in some sense, privileged they are lucky to have this foot in the door should it exist in that particular situation or industry. People who can't afford to do these things, people who can't pay to get into the system, pay several thousand pounds, I'll say to work for a summer, unpaid here in London, just in terms of the expenses of rent and food and these sorts of things. Those people who can't do that are essentially left out, they're left out of the system, and therefore barred from a whole range of professions which now have made unpaid internships a virtual prerequisite. You're reading your book, I couldn't work out whether it was more unfair on the people who've got the internships or the people who didn't get the internships. It's a dual problem. Existing internships have to be reformed, there has to be pay for real work. On the other hand, internships have to be opened up, it has to be a more transparent process for getting into them, and people who don't have access need to have access to these professions. Yes, it is. If a young person came to you and asked you, should I become an intern or not? Because it seems to me that I have no other way. What advice would you give? I would say weighed very carefully into the internship morass if you must. If you feel you must work unpaid and you can manage to do it, for any individual it might make sense in a particular situation to do this for a brief period of time. But don't get caught in the internship trap, know your rights, and once you're doing real work that you should be paid for under the National Minimum Wage Act, you should be receiving that pay. In some respects, it ought to be, as it were, illegal, we're supposed to have a minimum weight. Under the laws of most countries, and here in Britain under the National Minimum Wage Act, it is illegal to be doing, in almost every situation, to be doing real work with set duties and set hours and not being paid. Change, sure. Let me ask the question from the other perspective. So now I'm going to wear my hat as the CEO of Grace Cathedral, as it were, and say what would make a great internship experience? If I was going to set up three internships at Grace Cathedral, which is a kind of cultural center as well as a religious center in the middle of San Francisco, what would be great? If you can pay enough for somebody to live on, so that they're not worried about how they're going to pay the rent while they're interning, if you can offer them the reasonable prospect of a full-time job at the end of it, or at least, you know, something that won't move their career head in an appreciable way, and if you can offer a certain degree of training and mentoring at the same time, if those three components are in place, it's a great internship, and there aren't many great situations out there. So that's serious budgeting, actually. Yeah. You've really got the fact of that, isn't it? You've got to think about it. Organizations do need to, you know, I think there's a sort of casual attitude prevailing right now, permissiveness, where it's just, oh, let's bring on some interns to fill in this work. But I think organizations need to think seriously before they do it and know what they're getting into it. Can the government do something? What's that? And the government do something. Can the government... The government can first of all enforce the law, absolutely, and, you know, make sure that people are getting paid for the work they do, that regular workers are not being displaced by this phenomenon, but also some of the proposals that Nick Clegg has put out there, despite the cries of hypocrisy in recent months, would make a lot of sense. Jonathan, why do you think it's proliferated in internship over the last couple of decades, you say? It's part of a number of larger phenomenon, the rise of various kinds of contingent and precarious work situations, freelancing, temping, independent contractor arrangements. Our whole economy seems to have moved, as it's gone into more service-based things, from the idea of full-time work into these more sort of precarious arrangements. Is it partly the endless hypocrisy of the Baby Boomer generation who sort of put up all the ladders behind them and talk glibly about flat organizations and loose organizations, and then simply exploit the younger people who haven't got the rights that they had? There is a generational dimension to it. Baby Boomers are encouraging, encouraging their offspring to do these things, they're often subsidizing them and creating these situations as employers. They themselves, of course, never had to work unpaid for a substantial period of time, and yet they've sort of normalized it now and said, "Well, this is fine." But there is a virtue in internship, as there was in apprenticeship. You're not saying that internship is per se a bad thing, it's just the way it's handled. I absolutely don't believe in the abolition of all internships instantly, or anything like that, or religious prohibition against internships. I think that any developed society needs to find a way to bring people from school, from education world into the world of work. But you have to think about what is the least wasteful, most fair and just system of doing that, and internships right now don't fit the bill. Well, if anybody listening is hoping that there's an internship going in Bedford at the Panacea Society, I think that's probably closed. Cheers down. Thank you to all my guests today. Ross Berlin's Intern Nation had to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy. Jane Shaw's Octavia, daughter of God, Anzier-Din Sadars reading the Quran are all out now. Jonathan Kent's production of Emperor and Galilean opens at the National Theatre on Thursday for previews and is on until the end of July. Next week we're going to be talking about courts and the origins of South Africa we'll be talking about advertising in the city and what's going to happen in London after the Olympics is over with Keita Regan-John Hegety and in Sinclair, but for now, thank you and goodbye. Ryan Seacrest here. When you have a busy schedule, it's important to maximize your downtime. One of the best ways to do that is by going to Chumbah Casino.com. Chumbah Casino has all your favorite social casino games like spin slots, bingo, and solitaire that you can play for free for a chance to redeem some serious prizes. So hop on to Chumbah Casino.com now and live the Chumbah life. Sponsored by Chumbah Casino. At Sprouts, our wide open layout invites you in with healthy around every corner and tasty on every shelf. So when you walk in, you feel... Ahhhhhhh. This is that Sprouts feeling. (upbeat music)

Producer: Katy Hickman.