Start the Week

27/09/2010

Andrew Marr talks to the economist Will Hutton about the need to transform a country blighted by inequality and indebted to big finance. While Will Hutton argues for a fairer society, Lars Kroijer comes clean about the life and decisions of a hedge fund manager. Also arguing for greater fairness is Billy Ivory whose latest screenplay, Made In Dagenham, charts the walkout of the women workers at the Ford car plant who fought for equal pay in the 1960s. Women demonstrators form the backbone of Ronit Avni's new documentary film, which shows how one community organiser united both Palestinian and Israeli supporters to save his village from destruction by Israel's Separation Barrier.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 27 Sep 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello. Fairness and struggle today. As the Israeli moratorium on West Bank building ends, we're going to be hearing from the filmmaker Ranit Avni about attempts at peaceful, non-violent resistance by Palestinian villagers and their Jewish allies. But most of today's program is domestic. As Ed Miliband prepares for his first big speech as Labour leader, lots of talk about the fairness agenda, the prospects for union militancy and the wickedness of high finance. Well, Billy Ivery's new film made in Diagonum is about the 1968 strike by women workers at the huge Ford plant there, which led, of course, to the equal pay laws. Lars Krier is a former hedge fund manager who has written a cracking book about what it's really like inside the industry people love to hate but mostly don't understand at all. We're going to start, though, with a man both the coalition and Labour have gone to for his ideas about fairness and equality, Will Hutton, whose new book is called Them and Us. At the heart of this book, Will is the proposition that fairness, rather than the more traditional word, equality, should be centred for our thinking about pay and indeed about power. Why fairness rather than equality? I think fairness is a bigger idea than equality. Equality, of course, within the idea of fairness, you can have eagletarians who are considering themselves, who have libertarians who consider themselves to be fair. So, if fairness kind of embraces both, the heart of fairness is an idea of proportionality. It's a relationship that we all carry between what we intend and what the outcome is. If we hold good intentions and there are good outcomes, everyone thinks that we should get our due desserts. If we have bad intentions which produce malevolent outcomes, everyone thinks we should also get our due desserts. In all societies, there's scales measure, calibrate a tariff of punishment and reward for good and bad things. And fairness tries to capture this. It also is bigger than equality in this important respect. Luck has an enormous effect on all our lives. Good and bad luck, it's just there. And if you're thinking hard about fairness, we want to share people's good luck and we want to compensate them for their bad luck. So, there's an egalitarian view of fairness, there's a libertarian view of fairness, but that's the heart of my thinking of fairness. When it comes to luck in different ways, the luck to be enormously athletic, or the luck to have fantastic good looks, or indeed the luck to have wonderful fluency in mathematics or a language, all kinds of luck which can lead you to be a better, remunerated, more successful person in life, should that luck be sort of compensated against? In other words, should you pay a penalty for that kind of luck? You shouldn't pay a penalty for it. It's fair enough that you have got those advantages, and it's particularly fair if you've worked on them to turn yourself into a great athlete or a great mathematician. And we all consider that the rewards that people get for having worked hard on their talents is success. That's fair enough. But to a degree that they should pay into the common pool, to help compensate for people who've had, in their lives, bad luck. In the book I talk about inheritance tax, where you've done nothing to, you know, you've just come up, you've just the fruit of your parents' loins, and there you are, a baby, you've done nothing to deserve the money that comes from being born to a very rich family. And rather than call inheritance tax a death tax, I call it we share in your good luck tax. It's a long name, but yeah, I get the picture. You claim an actual health service to a degree is we share in your bad luck. If you're around this state, people listening to this, they don't know where they're going to draw on from the gene pool, things that are going to make them extraordinarily ill. Of course, it's a matter of fairness that we should compensate people for that bad luck. How do you begin to apply these kind of ideas to the dilemmas of the real world? For instance, a great discussion at the moment. You're looking at the public sector as to whether, you know, I suppose, television presenters or people running big NHS hospitals or head teachers or doctors are paid the right multiple of the lowest paid people in the organization. How do you begin to kind of approach that with an eye on fairness? Well, first of all, I think you have to acknowledge that good efforts should be rewarded. What was interesting in the panorama programme last week was watched by a lot of people. The chief constable of Cleveland, who's done a great job in actually lowering the crime rates in Cleveland by dramatic work amounts and earns £200,000 a year. The residents of Cleveland didn't say, "Oh my God, he's paid too much." They said, "This man is worth his hire." And so I think one and then... And you could say the same potentially about someone like who's a very successful football player, who millions of people go to watch and follow. But this is the point about personality, because and why it's important to get this balance between what I call a libertarian view of fairness and an egalitarian view of fairness, because a footballer can say, or a hedge fund manager, or an investment banker, or as the CEO of a large company, this success of this organization, this team, this company is all down to me. And it's only fair that I should scoop the pool. I should do everything. That's fair. And if you want to attract people like me, then you've got to pay me the maximum that I could possibly be worth. And then there's other people who say, "Hold on a minute. A football team is a team. A company is a social organization. More than a school is more than the headmaster. There are a lot of people who contribute to this good outcome. And that's an egalitarian view of fairness. And what I've tried to do is to fuse these two and to say, "Yes, come up with this sort of mathematical slide rule principle in the middle, which allows that fusion to take place." Yes. Well, this is the direction of my thinking, you know, that you do accept due desserts for this extra effort, for being what you're worth, but within limits. It should be bounded. And the boundary is, and this was the Prime Minister's idea when he gave me this commission, not mine, the boundary should be 20 to 1 in the public sector. And that's got a good pedigree. The Americans at the end of the 19th century, JP Morgan, the great bank, was running a 20 to 1 ratio right up until the First World War, Drucker, the great management theorist in the States. He also thought that 2021 was a reasonable ratio. John Lewis Partnership worked on this. It's got a good pedigree. It would take, and it would take you back to the kinds of multiples that were common in the 1950s and 1960s, I suspect, in all sorts of organizations. In base pay. Which have gone away. In base pay, it's within bonuses, even in the city, as late as the early 1990s. Yes. And it's saying, yes, if you're good, you should make a lot of money. If you're productive, if you're, it's trying to do a distinction between productive entrepreneurship, people who really generate wealth in our society. You know, I mentioned, everyone knows about James Dyson. You could also talk about autonomy, the company that's gone from nothing to something in 15 years or the Cambridge Science department, the biggest companies in the country. You know, we need more autonomy, more James Dyson's, and we need a few less hedge funds and a few less investor factors. I'll let you last, I'll let you spend a hedge fund in a second. And if we don't run our, if we don't run our capitalism with some sense of proportionality, if trying to make sure that rewards go to where people have really contributed genuinely effort and also accept there should be some boundary to what they get. We get into trouble. And that's one of the reasons we had our financial crisis. You, I mean, you've already, as it were, jumped, jumped the boundary or the border between the public sector and the private sector. Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband wants to talk about, has been talking about a high pay commission in the private sector. I mean, I can see that if there was a 20 to 1 proportionality rule in the public sector, that would start to set messages, social messages, which might influence the private sector. But could you do more than influencing the private sector in the mobile world of international capital? Well, David Cameron and George Osborne in the, in the, in scope of the review they asked me to do, have asked that exact question. They said, okay, what is the argument for 20 to 1 in the public sector? And to what extent could that become a social norm, a nudge behavior in the private sector? So I'll be trying to answer that question in the, in the, in the final report. Which comes out in November, which the inter report comes out in November and the final report comes out in the, in the spring of next year. Yeah. But I mean, the private sector is, of course, you know, there's much more risk in the private sector. And you see, you might have to adjust the, the 21 ratio in the public sector, you might have to have some of the risk premium of what's happening in the private sector. And, you know, and there's, and you've got to kind of try and contextualize even the public sector, what the pay ratio might be. But, you know, I don't see why some, there's this notion of accepting due dessert for discretionary effort that people are worth, are worth their hire. And we all accept it. It shouldn't be a reasonable one within boundaries. I don't see why it shouldn't be a reason. Ronnie, how do you want to come in here? I'm just curious about how that works in a globalized society. Now, is that ratio of 20 to 1 only applicable in a national context? Or is it 20 to 1 if you've got companies overseas with an entirely different standard of living and base pay rate? Well, you know, if we had global governance, one might start talking about this in the, but I don't see why 21 shouldn't be a ratio that shouldn't apply across most kind of liberal democracies. Certainly the debt, you know, it came out of, you know, the United States originally. If you look at most of the member states, the European Union, and indeed actually some of the, you know, South Korea or Japan, you'll find that that is currently, you know, broadly where they're at or just above it. This wouldn't, I mean, it's really only a few economies, the Americans and some parts of the rich economy, where this is such an acute issue. Last question. Yeah, I have a question between the difference between this productive answer for entrepreneurship and the kind we sort of rent seeking entrepreneurship. You mentioned in the book a very interesting study that the 10 largest private equity deals returned some 300% from 2005 to 2007. And that only a fifth of that was due to, to say, the right kind of answer for ownership. My question really is, to me, that's a, that's actually very, very good number. If you suggest that you're returning, it comes down to some 15% a year return on equity from actual value creation. I mean, I know people in the clean tech sector that would love that. And I actually took that study to say, well, private equity sort of using those numbers proved it's worth. Well, don't you in your book say that the one, you know, when you have to tell your investors what the railroad return is, and you didn't want to say the word 12, and now you're saying that 15 is great. Yeah, I'd be very happy to explain that. That has a lot to do with the difference in the risk that you're taking. If you're creating, in fact, the 15% you quote here, which is why I consider phenomenal, is because it's when you've taken the other factors away, namely the market and debt, you've actually denced it down to just actual value creation. That's phenomenal. Like, if I'd done that, I'd be bigger than George Soros. Yeah, but but but but but I mean, the big new dreams in your dreams. But that that that is a reality. That's but that's the residual after the returns from all the leverage. And to get it to get it to get it, there is. Okay. Well, okay. But to get it the residual, you had to have, you know, billions and tens of billions, hundreds of billions of pounds of leverage, which is actually now about to be unwound. And one of the reasons why when we got into such trouble in 2008 was all this extraordinary leverage. Yeah. Right. Okay. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna return to English. No, just I feel like you need a cool flannel on your head sometimes, weren't you? We're discussing these kind of things. But I mean, what struck me about the book, which I just think it's such a radical book. I mean, it's an extraordinary book, I think. Well, and it's language is very it's very reasonable. But I think what it's what it's suggesting and fantastically so is a really, really major rethink of society. And I think that that irrespective of of what of what works and what what doesn't work, it's just that at a human level, it's going to require such a fundamental shift in the way that we in the way that we think and the way that, you know, we particularly particularly in this country, I mean, you talk globally, I mean, you know, think about an Englishman's home is his castle, all that kind of sort of ingrained, you know, let's shut the door and and bolt it. And and I just wonder how how you think that we can, you know, that we can really make those those social changes. I wonder if it is such a big big difficulty that once you get sort of leadership and political politicians talking about it, whether ideas don't spread a little bit faster than we. Well, you, I mean, at the moment, we've got, I mean, here I am, you know, I've written this, I've written this book and the coalition governors asked me to do this review, which will be informed by some of the thinking in this. And there's the new leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is talking about a high pay commission. And I don't see how you could do a high pay commission without it being informed by some of these ideas as well. So, you know, once you get the political class talking in this way, you at least have the first building block. Because, you know, I, I, my view in democracies is that you just have to argue your head off. You have to argue your head off about about what you think is right and keep on arguing. And one of the problems with the Labour Party under Gordon Brown of particular was that it stopped arguing. It just was, you know, declamed. And we, and we may, I think, be entering a very interesting territory where the coalition government and the Labour opposition started to have an argument about how you do fairness. That would be very interesting. Well, one of the things that they'll be talking about all the way through this, of course, is the financial section, banking sector. And we hear an awful lot about hedge funds. But last crier, you created your own hedge fund. And you've written this book, Money Mavericks, Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager. And it's the human story, which we don't really often hear about what it's actually like being a hedge fund manager and what it's all about. But before we do that, try and explain to us what the hedge fund is. Unfortunately, there isn't a really decent definition of a hedge fund. It's actually a term that gets thrown around a lot. And I think that outside the industry, there's this perception that it's, it's easy to define and they all do the same stuff. I mean, nothing could be further from the truth. It's generally known to be, it's a private partnership. They tend to be managing wealthy individuals and institutional money. And the word hedge fund came actually from many, many years ago, this guy in the US called Jones who created and marketed a fund called the hedged fund. The idea being that you could somehow hedge your return against certain risks that you didn't want to take. So you could hedge against markets going down. It's since then there's been a tremendous proliferation of hedge funds. And today the term means investing in any kind of asset class and any kind of geography with vastly different gearing levels. So a lot of nice years. It's a financial instrument which can do lots of different things depending on the skills that we're running at. Correct. I think there's, in hedge funds, one of the things, the inside is an industry appreciated. The most is that you have the using financial tools, the flexibility to do a lot of, express a lot of investment views that you couldn't do just buying the market. So your fund, explain what the idea was behind your fund. So my fund was what you'd call a market neutral special situations fund. So that sounds complex. If you break it into two, you say special situations, well, that means you hardly ever hear of a situation that doesn't think it's special. But it's typically something involving a merger, restructuring complex corporate structure of some sort that you can break down into its constituent parts. The market neutrality means that what we aim to do was to have the returns that our investors got from investing with us, have those returns in no way be related to movements in the market. So in other words, whether you've made a lost money investing in Hold The Cabell didn't depend on the wider market going up or down. Right. Also known as serial correlation. And at one point at one point, which I know is completely phony, isn't it? I think that the issue of correlation is one of those massively overused words. And it's not going to be, it's not going to be overused on this program anymore. Right. One thing that I did strike me, a bit of the book where I really understood or thought I understood what was going on, is where you talk about the different variables that you're juggling with. You can have three variables involving the situation inside a company and currency and the general market position. And then you've got a fourth variable. And it's at that point where a very, very few, very, very clever people might be able to hold in their heads information about what's happening and therefore make predictions about the future. But most people can't. I think this is actually an area where I feel we are able to use finance to make complex things simpler. That if you think of investing, just buying a share in a company, I think in Italian companies, the one I use in the book, which you buy in Italian bank, but you're really buying the Italian market. You're buying certain currency exposes, you're buying an insurance company, you're buying this, you're buying that. And where we through hedging structures can actually make that bank into something that is much simpler to understand and much similar to analyze. So I always find a curious when someone says, you should buy the bank and you then ask them, well, what do you think of its insurance bit? And they say, oh, I don't really know, that's not what I analyze, well, so we can actually take that insurance bit and hedge it out. So you know what you're buying? So it sounds very complex, and the structure can be, but you're trying to make something complex into something simpler. There's a great human story here because I had this idea in my head of hedge fund managers, they go running vastly expensive cars and they live in this very, very swanky world and they're masters of the universe and it's all great. And actually, when you're getting your hedge fund going, it's not like that at all. You're going to these conferences and no one's speaking to you because you're not big enough yet. It's like anything else. I think one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was really that it's partly to deal with that misperception. There seems commonly accepted and understood that all hedge fund managers fly private jets and they have multi-billionaires and some are, but many, many more are not. Starting a hedge fund was, in a sense, it was more about starting a business being an entrepreneur and it was just really, really hard-going. Don't pay yourself much very much and it's your baby. I pay myself zero and I spend most of my savings trying to get it off the ground and I had this in my spreadsheet that every day I went to work where we weren't raising any money, I would have a day less before I'd have to shut it down. So I was down to 12 months and at that point I was going to, it's unfair to say go live in my parents' basement, but I was going to need to go get a job because I was running out of money. So that's, in a sense, just an entrepreneurial story that happened to be in the world of hedge funds. Exactly. And similarly, once things are going wealth your hedge fund and it's buzzing, you get drawn into this extraordinarily accelerated world of, if not private jets, at least extraordinary parties and you're working 19 hours a day and all of that. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't want to cast myself too much as an outsider because I wasn't. I was privileged, I was a great education, I worked for a very prestigious fund before I started my own. But even when we're running a lot of money and doing very, very well, there's still not that world. I mean, I know a lot of hedge fund managers and most of them, you know, where old Jack is and drive old cars. They can net forward probably by a new fancy car every day if they wanted to, but they don't. And I certainly think it's a misperception that everyone is like that. And just before we open this up, there's one story which I thought was incredibly moving, but also sort of everybody's had these times in their life where there's a sort of day where everything goes wrong at once, the great crisis day would be in a novel. And in your case, it was with a Norwegian shipyard, very important for your fund and it was going down the tubes and you've got a call from your girl's nursery to say that you've got something in her eye and you ended up in the hospital. In the Marlebone Eye Hospital. Yeah, what happened was we had one of these mornings where, let's think about financial markets, you don't realize that things can come from just nowhere. It's just a regular morning by 9am, I lost 10 million dollars. That's a lot of money. And just as things, and there was really actually downhill from there, and one of these things from financial markets, you just don't know where the bottom is and it's just going when you're sitting there, you don't know what to do, you don't feel prepared, you don't feel you know anything. And in fact, the market has just proved that you don't know what you're doing. And at that point, I get a call from my, I had twin daughters and I get a call from the nursery that one of them had a piece of metal stuck in her eye and that I had to take her to the eye hospital. My wife and our nanny had both forgotten their mobile phones. So there I am getting calls from the front and center and sort of the market at wearing its ugly head and I just have to bolt and go to the eye hospital and we're standing in the operation room and I'm still getting phone calls about this situation and I'm so a part of this world that I take the calls. So I take the calls as I'm preparing to hold down my daughter to open her eye. And you know, it's a long way from the smooth slick world of finance that people receive, but I think it's a lot closer to the reality that. And that was the moment where you think, what am I doing in my life? Yeah, there are a lot of things that went into that. But clearly, I'd been doing it for a long, long time. I'd done very, very well. And yeah, I'd probably reached the point where it wasn't fair to my investors for me to keep going. And we weren't doing well. Yeah. This is before the crash. So a lot of things played into it. But I think the overall thing is that in my new memories, I wanted to give the human side of it. And so this is why it's so light on finance. Billy Ivory. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a great read, actually. I mean, there were great bits of it. I didn't understand. I'll be honest with you. And I'm not, I don't think I'm the brightest. Not me, Billy. I'm with you. But it was what was interesting for me was that kind of the human side of it. And but I still, I still did find myself thinking that although it was very informed gambling, a lot of it did still seem like it was gambling. And that kind of made me maybe a bit nervous, you know, those sort of just those huge amounts of money. And I just wondered whether, you know, do you just become, so do you just become impervious to sort of the numbers that you're talking, because you're doing it all the time? There is an element that you're staring at your screen and their numbers flicking. You know, they go red, black, red, black, you're making losing money. And it does it from the outside can easily look like a casino. But you got to keep in mind that you should only be managing other people's money if you believe you can do better than throwing darts, you're charging large fees. And for those large fees, investors have a right to expect that you're going to do something better. It's not a gambling then. And, you know, it's, you think the fees structure is exciting. I think, I think the fee structure is very problematic. I think actually, early point in private equity, I think it's a case in point that you're what I want to illustrate in the book is just, yeah, there are a lot of people that have money in hedge funds, even if they don't know they do. What do you guys pinch? You might have invested in hedge funds. Well, five percent of most pensions. That varies a lot. But I think it's just very important for people to acknowledge that that doesn't mean hedge funds don't make sense. It just means that the hurdle they have to clear to make sense is very high. We're going to move to the other end of the scale now and still talking about fairness and money and so on. And we're going to rewind back to 1968, the Ford Dagenham plant, 55,000 men there, 187 women. And it's the era of strikes and the women go on strike. And it becomes an equal pay strike. Billy, you've made a, what is it actually a kind of very up feel good film about this? I mean, people are going to really enjoy it and they're going to laugh and they're going to cry and all the rest of it. How accurate is it to the events of that particular time and place? It's pretty true actually. I mean, it's certainly the sort of the real politics and what was going on at the time is absolutely as it is in the film. The year before, there'd been I think 27,000 strikes in just in the motor industry in '67. And it was just, it was just chaos. And certainly there were 15 unions forward looking after the workers. And it was just, they were getting used to strikes all the time, but they were settled quite quickly. And then when the women came out, they just didn't behave as the men. And that's what that's what threw everybody, including including the union. But certainly, I mean, all of the, all of the, Barbara Castle, the way she's portrayed, I mean, she's a, she's a slightly kind of rare for more rarefied version, perhaps other than the real thing. But, but you know, everything that she talks about was all the stuff I'd got from her, from her diaries and from interviews with her and stuff like that. Yes. And at the end of the film, you, we actually see some of the women who were on strike at the time being interviewed. So they're also, they were probably not quite as glamorous as the actresses that you selected to, or were selected for the film. But no, no, I mean, the thing thing, the big thing for me was, I mean, there were people there, I could easily have just lifted straight from, straight from the, the, the, the factory floor. But because the nature of the movie was that I wanted to kind of dramatize the personal lives a lot. And I felt, I felt uncomfortable doing that. I mean, there was a, let's just tell there was one lady who was well known as effing Eileen on the, on the, on the plant. And I thought, I just can't use that, we'll just take it too far for a family film. So I just kind of, you know, extrapolated from that. And, and, and, and I got bleeding Brenda, who was just, I, illiterated slightly differently, but you know, I just, I just took bits and bobs from the people who were. Yes. And it was an extra, it was obviously a big moment of social change as well, which, which gives you an awful lot of the, the context. It's, it's the moment where, you know, what we think of the 60s has reached Dagenham. But I think what was funny about Andrew was that, you know, you got the, the, the, the Dagenham itself was, I mean, when the, when the women came up to parliament as they did to protest, you know, that was, that was a, that was a major trip out. And in terms of the swinging 60s, a lot of it hadn't, you know, it was, it was taking a long time to filter through to Dagenham. And we wanted to try and get a sense of that there was all the color. It was starting to bleed through into that, that part of East London. But it's, it's still interesting. We think of the 60s. It's still a time when a lot of the men are in sort of drip-dry white shirts and narrow ties and, and sober suits. And you know, it's, it's, there aren't many loons and then. No, no, I've seen, I mean, I think what was, what was really interesting was that there was a sort of, there was a kind of very British way of even, even the, the industrial unrest. It was all kind of, I think, Ken Cranham, who's in the film, says it one time, you know, the women say, look, you know, why have they sent us this letter? And he said, well, that's what they do. It's like the rules. You know, we've always done strikes like this. And, and even, so even the sort of, even the unrest is kind of, it's all controlled. And then so when, when the women actually in a very, doing that wonderfully sort of British thing of being very just saying, I'm not sure I quite agree with that, but then putting their foot down saying, and I really don't agree with it. And, and when the management said, well, perhaps, you know, we'll talk about it, you'd like to go back to work. And they said, no, no, it's a matter of principle. It really did shake everything to its foundations at that point, because it was such a radical thing, but said so easily. You couldn't have made an upbeat film about strikes in the 1960s, unless it was about equal pay, though. Could you really? No, I mean, you know, it was, that's one of the, in terms of a subject for me as a writer, I mean, that was, that was the godsend was. Because an awful lot of British industry was hammered by strikes and industrial relations. There's a point in the film where the Ford worker, the Ford management officials come across, he says to Barbara Cassie, you know, he said, look, you know, you've got to let us, you've got to let us, you've got to hold the line with us here against the unions, or we'll take our cars, we'll take our industry elsewhere. And of course, that is what happened. And there were times working on the film where also, you know, there's a bit where Barbara Cassie was with Wilson and she's saying, you've got to give me the power to deal with the unions. And Wilson's just kind of, he's saying, get Jack Scampin and let's just get beer and pork pie and it'll all be fine. And again, you know that they're storing up problems for later and indeed 17, you know, winter discontent, it did all, it did all come to a head then. Yes. The bit that I thought must be completely fictitious is the very posh woman, who's the wife of one of the Ford managers and forms a sort of a systole solidarity with the leader of the strikers. That can't have happened, can it? I'm afraid it can't be charged. I thought it didn't. I thought it was very moving. What what did the rest of us make of this? Fantastic film. You know, it's all credit to, you know, the BBC and the UK Film Council and that are fun for funding it. You know, you really capture, you know, 1968 Britain. But I also thought, you know, when, when I learned who the four people have been gathered here, that what's the common theme between all of us? And it wasn't obvious to me until I, you know, I'm finally saw by Drew's last night. And I thought, my God, you know, this is justice. You know, there's the fact that common theme here is, is, you know, what constitutes justice? What constitutes fairness? And you know, there you are. You, that what made that strike legitimate and comes and was in terms of the early discussion we have about equality and fairness was that actually it is absolutely clear that men and women should get paid the same rate for the same job. And there's just no argument. It is that kind of egalitarian fairness working its way out indisputably. And in terms of the strike, there may be in a disproportional amount of strikes in the 1960s, 1970s. But this one was seen by everybody as completely proportional. And you capture a moment in labor history where, you know, a group of workers, I know these seven machinists actually do something, you know, fantastic and actually make these institutions kind of live in a way as they should have been lived. I mean, this is actually the point of, you know, organized labor when it gets itself into this position, you can see it is correcting a manifest injustice. And it's, and it's funny and it's inspiring and you capture the movement. I thought it was glorious. But did you like it? I'll actually, I'll second that. I thought one of the things I really liked about it was you, you managed to create this upbeat film. But you also show us how hard it's been for these, for the women, they had problems at home. There's the prospect of you ruining everyone's livelihood because they're just going to move abroad. And so you managed to create an upbeat movie, but you still show us those problems that become very relevant later on. Well, we're going to move on to another form of resistance now. One that's going on probably today and certainly last week and before that. And next week too, which is the struggle between Palestinian villagers in this case, in the West Bank and Israeli settlers. And networking between them is, of course, the security barrier, the Israeli wall. And your film is called Budrus, which is the name of the village where you set it. And the problem with Budrus, like so many villages, is that the Israeli wall is going to become between them and their fields, which they rely on. They're olive trees. And that's where it starts. Now, what makes Budrus different from other parts of the West Bank? In terms of what happened? Budrus faced something, as you mentioned, that's very common. But what really sets them apart is the strategy that they used in order to save the village. So I, Admorar, the main protagonist of the film, did something incredible that people speak about in theoretical terms, as though it hasn't happened. He united all of the political factions within the village. So Hamas, Fatah, PFLP, Islamic Jihad, they all came together. And they started to demonstrate non-violently, but without much success. And then his 15-year-old daughter in typical teenage fashion one day asks her father, "Where are all the women?" And her father, like a true community organizer, says, "Well, if you want women to participate, go ahead and organize them." And so the women come to the front lines. And that's when the situation in Budrus starts to change. And they start struggling side-by-side. Israelis come in, internationals come in. And after a 10-month period, I'm not going to give away the ending, but some remarkable, remarkable transitions happen as a result of this non-violent movement. You were in amongst the villagers and indeed the Israeli Defense Force as well. And there is a remarkable Israeli female soldier who becomes somebody that the villagers sort of target, particularly the women, target and shout-out and all the rest of it. And who you get talking back. Yes. Yes. Me and Levy was the border police woman stationed in Budrus at the time. And there is this... She's quite hardcore, isn't she? She's a very interesting character. People tend to be fascinated by her. They add every question and answer session after the film. I'm always asked about her. People want to know if her views have changed, if there's been some shift. But I think that her ambivalence is very characteristic. I mean, I think she looked at her work as a job. I mean, she looked at being there in Budrus and her conduct as her duty and her responsibility. And yet she saw that she was there. I'm sure she had thought that she was coming into defend Israelis from terror. And instead, she's faced with a 15-year-old girl and the women behind her from the village. And a really fascinating dynamic evolves between the women know her by name. And to this day, they still remember her. I mean, it's quite interesting because we brought the film back to the village to show it to them a few months ago. And all of them, when they saw yes mean, I mean, the recognition was full-on and lots of responses were elicited. I was also very struck by one of the things that the Israeli commander in the area said, where you're showing his people going pretty berserk. I mean, they're getting very, very angry and aggressive indeed. And he says, but they're only kids. They're only 18, 19-year-old. And the testosterone starts to flow. And I thought there was an honesty there. Whatever the politics of it, in the end, it's angry people getting over wrought facing each other. Absolutely. I think the age dynamic is apparent in the movie that you have 15-year-olds. You have 15-year-old Palestinians throwing stones, and you've got 18-year-old soldiers who are trying to build this barrier through the village. And ultimately, it's not about the youth. Ultimately, this is about the decision-makers. There was one other issue that's not directly addressed in the film, but really struck me when I was watching it, which is demography. Because you've got the different Palestinian families from Fatah and Hamas getting together, and they're all proud. They've got five or six or seven children. And you're thinking, this is a very small amount of land. There aren't many olive trees there. And maybe part of the problem is that there's just too many people growing in this area who are going to be sustained there. It's actually a very small village. And there is a lot. I mean, it is still an agricultural village. I think it speaks more to a rural, urban divide than anything else. It's a 1,500-person village. And they have about 3,000 olive trees. So it's not an overpopulated. I mean, we've been there, and it's spent quite a bit of time. It's not overpopulated. I think it does speak to issues of the economy, the economic state, and the fact that it's an agricultural community, reliant on big families to be able to harvest olives. And it's quite traditional. I thought I had the leader of the village as his humanity. And he's actually understanding, I'm just so versed in this about fairness and justice and desert now. But at one stage he says, well, Israel does have the right to look after the security of its citizens. But what's wrong with this war is this disproportionate. It's utterly disproportionate. It should take this, our olive trees on Israeli land, not from Palestine. Absolutely. It's utterly disproportionate. And by the way, it's not our due dessert that this should happen to us. And these two things, the disproportionality of the action, even while you acknowledge that the Israelis have got some reason for concern about this security. And the they're going to undo dessert. There can be undeservedness of this happening to his village. And you see this call for justice as springing up, and I thought it was a really great account of it. One thing I particularly liked about the movie, there's a, I don't know if you're supposed to talk about scenes here, but there's the scene where things are getting a bit out of hand, and just how hard it is to keep it non-violence. And what is non-violence? Can you throw a stone and still not be called violent? And those things are getting out of hand, the main protagonist sort of running around. He's nervous. Someone gets shot. And what I think is the brilliance of it all is that that takes us away from this slightly academic theoretical, what we ought to do down on the street to what actually happens when you try to do it. That was very much our intention. It's just difficult. That was very much our intention. I mean, we as a team were the three producers of the film were Israeli, Palestinian, and Brazilian, and we wanted to show this warts and all. And it does, you're right, it melts down at a certain point. And we want to move away from, you know, there's all this theoretical talk about could Palestinians adopt non-violence? Could Hamas and Fatah come together? Could women lead? And in the village of Budger's, they, all of these elements actually emerge. So why don't we speak about it from a place of its practical application on the ground? I have a question actually. In the movie, they show, you show very well this sick-sacking of this border. It seems just crazy. What, was there a logic? I know they're going to say security, but what would, what would they say, they'd really say, was the logic behind this? Just, I mean, it looks like like a board game war. All of these end up design. I mean, no war has ever succeeded at that end. But there's like the serpentine path. We, you know, the serpentine path definitely raises many questions. The Israeli army spokesperson, Don Spielmann, talks about security, for sure. And Palestinians view it as a land grab. And, you know, interestingly, we did interview it. He's not in the film. One of the initial proponents of building the barrier in the first place, who ultimately ended up taking, he's a very decorated war veteran, military veteran in Israel, and he ended up taking the government to court to sue them on the ultimate trajectory and in his words an exact quote from the interview is that security was sacrificed on the altar of the settlements. And so it's a, it's an open question that in some places it's security and in some places, you know, it's about land or water, topography, settlement, local settlements. We weren't able to get an official explanation from the army. We did ask them as to why this barrier was going to be built through a cemetery, for instance. Yeah. And of course, we should remind people that it's the moratorium on the settlements is as ended today. Billy. Yeah. Just what one of the things that struck me was just, you know, I think we're all talking about sort of entrenched attitudes, you know, the last as well, that, you know, the way people perceive the financial sector. But what struck me in the film that was so fantastic was to actually see those moments where people are, that the school teacher, that who's the the Hamas leaders, that was, you know, when he, there's one interview with him where he sort of says, I can't ever imagine standing alongside, you know, the opposition effectively on the, and I've just done that. And the look on his face, the Israelis and Palestinians, that's together. Yeah. And it's just incredible. And you suddenly realize, I guess it's what you're saying is, well, well, you sort of, that it's about things happening in action. And then when they do, you kind of go, actually, yeah, this is, this is going to work. This does work. And it's incredible that moment. It's definitely, I think, one thing that we were interested in, this, this idea of pragmatism, that people can be a lot more pragmatic on this issue, then we often give them credit for, whether it's the women in the village, whether it's the Israeli activists, whether it's the Hamas members. I do hope that people will go and see it because I do think that it does shatter a whole variety of stereotypes. It's playing until October 7th at the Empire Lester Square Theater. I was going to read all of that, Andrew. One of the things that struck me about, you occasionally go to news footage from the Israeli television. And it's one of the things in Will's book that I was really, really interested in, which is the whole thing about how attitudes are, how attitudes are reinforced by a very, a very sort of static media, or a media that will, will tell the truth effectively. And I mean, what was, what is the coverage? Is it fair? The cover, what was fascinating to us was to see the evolution of coverage. So whereas the Israeli activists joining the Palestinians in Budres were initially called peace, peace marchers, peace, peace demonstrators, over time they become riots, they become, you know, the language shifts. Changes. Okay. Well, we're going to give people an opportunity to see that film. Budres from Renee Taverney on it selected, cinemas actually around the country, I think, from now, you can find all the details on the start of the week website. Billy Ivory is made in Dagenham is on general lease, as you can see, from almost every bus stop anywhere in Britain from Friday. Will Hutton's them and us changing Britain why we need a fair society and Lars Kreuer's money mavericks, confessions of a hedge fund manager are both out, as they say, in all good bookshops now. Next week, we have Jonathan Franson, whose great American novel, Freedom, has got reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic slavery. Sheila Stevenson on Enlightenment, a play and philosopher Barry Smith on how neuroscience is raising more questions than they could ever have dreamed of. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.