Start the Week

20/09/2010

In the first programme of a new series of Start the Week the former MP Lord Hattersley charts the life and politics of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of the welfare state, and a working class man who came to understand the pitfalls of a coalition government. Andrew Marr looks back to the 1980s with the writer Andy McSmith who argues this was the conflict decade, defined by strikes, war and riots. And the philosopher Mary Midgley also criticises the individualism of the time, maintaining that Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' was never a creed in which to live one's life. The Irish-American community in New York is the setting for Richard Bean's new play, in which he uncovers the plots and deals that lead to the American funding of the IRA.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 20 Sep 2010
Audio Format:: other

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The philosopher Mary Midgely argues that thanks to the influence of Darwinist writers in our account of human life we place too much emphasis at the moment on individualism and selfishness, while the writer and journalist Andy McSmith addresses the so-called decade of individualism, the 1980s, in a book he calls no such thing as society. Part of the raw edge of those years came, of course, from IRA violence, and that provides the backdrop for a new play about the IRA in New York by Richard Bean. First, though, a liberal leader who aroused great hopes for change, but later became entangled in a conservative dominated coalition government. We are talking about David Lloyd George, of course, who is the subject of a strikingly hostile new biography by Roy Hattersley. Roy, you say right at the beginning of this that the idea came from Roy Jenkins, who said he thought it was important to do a big new biography of Lloyd George, but he couldn't stand it because he couldn't bear him. By the end of your book I felt that you had much the same view. Well, the two of Lloyd George's, that's a problem. The Lloyd George between, let's say, 1890 and 1918 I've nothing but admiration for. I've no doubt had I been a young man in the House of Commons in 1910, I would have followed Lloyd George to the death. I think I say in the introduction he is the great radical of British politics and performed that radical function in a way that I found rather attractive. He was reckless, he was daring, he was determined, he was vocal, he was aggressive, all those things. I think between coming into Parliament and the coalition going on into peace in 1918, he was a wonderful man politically, wasn't so wonderful privately, but was wonderful politically. After 1918 he's just grubbing about for power, and that combined with some of his personal behaviour is really rather unpleasant. So I start off liking him. I believed I was going to write a book that I liked, I liked the subject from start to finish, but he changes and my judgement changes too. Do you think it is possible or was possible for somebody who was so much an outsider as you describe him, to come into, want to be at the top of the power system of the British Empire, etc. without cutting corners, snatching money from dodgy people and behaving in a relatively disreputable way. In other words, there probably wasn't an honourable way to the top for someone like Lloyd George. I don't think he made a dishonable way to the top. He made a very disloyal way to the top in terms of his party allegiance. In fact, one of the things I found attractive about the early Lloyd George is that his loyalty was to a set of ideas, and he pursued those ideas, and if that meant abandoning friends, and if it meant abandoning the party, which had brought him to the House of Commons, he didn't care a damn about that. I don't think he had to be as he was. I think what made him the man, the man who emerged from the cottage, the cottage bread man, and he liked to call himself, to become Prime Minister, which is uniquely propitious upbringing. I mean, he was brought up by an uncle who doted on him. He was kept financially by a brother who worked his fingers to the bone to pay for Lloyd George's career, and he was supported by two women who adored him and sacrificed himself for him. If you have a group of people around, you will keep saying your destiny is to get to the top of politics. You begin to believe it, and if you're as able as Lloyd George was, and able he certainly was, then you do it. And when we look back at the good Lloyd George, as it were, how would you rank the different aspects of that? The people's budget and the radical reformer we sort of know quite a bit about, but what about the Lloyd George of the First World War, who in some ways started to create the welfare state? Well, Lloyd George, who raised the welfare state, stuck absolutely to his principles and was able to do that, because he dominated the Liberal Party, he dominated Mr Askman, even before he removed Mr Askman's from office to take over the permission of himself, he was the dominant figure. But he got into the coalition in 1916, which was essential, a coalition of necessity. With his hands tied behind his back, he made three promises. He promises not to put Winston Churchill in the government. He promises not to put Northliff, Lord Northliff in the government. I don't think he ever thought of doing that. And he promised us to keep Hage as commander-in-chief of the British Empire for whatever happened he had to keep Hage. And he knows that Hage's strategy is wrong. He has alternative strategy. And in my view, he doesn't take on Hage in the way he should. He couldn't have sacked Hage because the coalition would have collapsed. But he could have brought more pressure to bear on Hage to change his strategy. What he does, and this is when the new Lloyd George, the devious Lloyd George, becomes more obvious, he tries to get round Hage in various ways. He tries to undermine him. He tries to bypass him. The French might take over from him, for instance. Well, in the end, a French soldier did. A typical Lloyd George. When he first got to France, the Prime Minister, he got to see Hage, has a nice talk to Hage, tells Hage how much he has admired in Britain. And then he got to see Novell, the French commander-in-chief, and he said to Novell, what do you think about these generals then? The British generals aren't much good, are they? And of course, Novell being an officer and gentleman immediately reports this to Hage. So this is the devious Lloyd George, which we see much more of after 1916. But coalition to make people devious, because they make people compromise with their principles. We may be making a contemporary point here. I feel we may come on to that. But just before we do, the kind of really bad Lloyd George, as it were, the Lloyd George, who is absolutely up to his armpits in terrible selling of honours and corruption, and behaving appallingly in his private life, his actual life. He lives too long as a politician, doesn't he, in a way? Had he gone in 1918, the man who won the war, as the headlines said, had he not decided he could carry on into peace with the coalition, he would have been a figure comparable to Instant Churchill, he would have been the man who won the First World War, and he would have been the man who, as well as that, had this great domestic programme into his credit. But it's a dilemma in 1918. He has no party because he's leading what is effectively conservative coalition. That's a quasi-liberal. He can either abandon politics altogether, or he can lead the coalition into peace. Now, I understand, I don't approve, but I understand why he said, "Look, here I am at the height of my powers. I'm just not going to fade away." But had he faded? Well, he wouldn't have faded away. Had he gone to the backbenchers, saying the coalition's over, it's done its job. We would be regarding him as a great man. You know, the biography show the difference. You get a biography of Winston Churchill almost every year. This is the first one volume biography of Lloyd George for 50 years. The difference is very clear, but Lloyd George could have become the Churchill figure. Had he not tried to hang on to power from 1918 to 1922? And had he gone, I suppose, the whole history of 20th century politics might have been different. You might not have had the emergence of the Labour Party in the form it did, in the sense you might have had a more left-of-centre liberal party sticking with their unions and socialist politicians. And there might have been what Lloyd George had best wanted to see, which was a realignment of radical opinion. He wanted to see the radical coalition brought about. Mary Midgey. Sorry, this does make me, you've shown how important it is for politicians to die at the right moment. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm still working on it. Yeah. And it makes me. I thought you balanced the fact that you were sure I will. Speaking as a journalist, suppose Lloyd George had died at the right moment, would it then matter that he was actually quite an unpleasant guy, if all we'd had was his political achievements. The fact he was the man who would abandon his friends for the sake of success and had no sense of gratitude and was terrible to his wife. And terrible to his wife. We don't know that matter. I ask this because, as you know, when people write about living politicians, they don't write about what they do in office, but about how they behave towards their start. Well, I think Lloyd George poets up a great dilemma, which is probably a philosophy dilemma rather than a journalist or politicians. I mean, do we prefer bad men with good policies or good men with bad policies? And Lloyd George is a great example of a man who, well, I wouldn't want him to marry my sister, so to speak. But on the other hand, most of the things he did, and certainly up to 1918, are admirable things and will be right for this country and right for the people this country. But to push that further, I mean, that dilemma may be inherent in politics because the kind of people who kick and gouge and fight their way to the top are very often ego-driven, particularly aggressive people who are likely to behave badly to those around them. So it may not just be a sort of contingent thing, it may be part of the sort of personality that does come to the top. Yeah, he always feels you are unpleasant at a race, do you? Well, the ones who get to the top may be so driven and so aggressive that they are pretty difficult to live with. But he said putting it delicately. For what term, us, political journalists are up to at the moment, is sort of killing off the unpleasant ones, regardless of whether they're any good, because so much, there's so much concentration on the way people behave personally, that someone like George would have been killed by the press before. And this is one of the things that disturbed me about current politics, partly because we see the end of ideological politics. I mean, Lloyd George was an ideological politician and had a very firm view about things like land the ownership, about the balance between riches and the poverty. We don't have that ideological drive and ideological politics in a sense overcome the personal difficulties, because this is what he believes in and I'll go and fight for that. It's for him to just deal with that if you don't have an ideology. Richard Bean? Yeah, I thought one of the telling things about that and ideological politicians, I think we want them and we need them because they make pure and very often good decisions. And I thought what was very interesting was that when he started compromising and expediency ruled his life, like Versailles, for instance, I mean, there's the damning result of Versailles, where he's forced by what is it, 300 Tories behind in telling him to get particularly tough with the Treaty of Versailles with the Germans for reparations. Basically, you could draw a direct line from that to the Second World War, couldn't you, which was, whereas if Lloyd George was left on his own following the ideological, his own principles, he would have been more, well, it wouldn't have been as, the reparations wouldn't have been as serious. Well, he made an adjustment. In a sense, he caused that problem for himself by making speeches in the 1918 German Electron, which promised to give the Germans a tough time. He then thought about it and really decided that was a mistake, tried to rewrite the Versailles treaty at one point. Keynes convinced him it was a mistake, till it would be an economic collapse, as well as political difficulties. But by then, it was too late. He'd excited the idea, it wasn't his, but one of his ministers' phrase, to squeeze German until the pip squeaks. And by then, it was too late for him to change his mind. Well, if he was a highly agitistic and self-interested individual, he certainly had, as we described, some wider principles. Mary Midgely, you'd approve of that. In The Solitary Self-Darwin and The Selfish Junior, a new book, you argue that, as a society at the moment, we overemphasize the importance of individualism and selfishness in our explanations of human behavior. And this is really the fault, if I could put it, that way of neo-Darwinists. Yes. I mean, what I particularly has roused me to get writing another book in my old age, is the way this misrepresentes Darwin. Darwin wasn't at all inclined to that way of thinking. But I wouldn't be bothering about it, if I didn't think that it's now a great fault of our age. Individualism seems to me a rather general word, which covers the right kind of regard for individuals as well as selfishness. When it comes to actually praising selfishness, you see, then it does seem to me to have got a bit mad. And I think it's one of those swings, which, more importantly, we find historians constantly explaining us. During shortly after the Second World War, there was a great deal of public spirit. There was, people were not at all ashamed to talk in terms of loyalty and so forth. And the East got the National Health Service and similar matters. People after the war got very tired of behaving themselves carefully in this way. And when various prophets started to tell, "Actually, you needn't it far better just to go your own hook." And they rushed out and did it. And I think it's very interesting how actually this was happening already in the '70s, very strongly. Before Margaret Thatcher came along, I think in my book, I rather identified it with her and Andy McSmith rightly tells me that it didn't start. Thatcher didn't start. Well, I know Thatcher didn't start till the '80s. But the immense success of the selfish genius seemed to me to have been... The Richard Dawkins book. That's right. To this, he had carried on a great wave of, "Can't we attend to ourselves now?" And unfortunately, it's a really powerful stuff because, as it were, he did it straight from his subconscious, I'm sure, that carried strong natural motivations. What I wonder is whether you're not conflating two different things, the very powerful metaphor that Dawkins uses about the selfish replicators, the genes only interested in producing genes, which, since genes don't have self-consciousness, must be a metaphor on the one hand. And it's something that he certainly pushes in his early books quite aggressively, plus consumerism outside and society, and the selfishness of that. Because I suspect that people like Dawkins would say, "Well, actually, because we have been able to overcome our biological destiny to a certain extent, we can then make choices which don't involve selfishness necessarily." That, of course, is how people take it. And it's what Dawkins says. To say that something is only a metaphor when it totally dominates your writing is not impressive. You know, rhetoric is an essential part of what people say. And you see, why choose the word "selfish" in the first place? The official scientific part of the self-esteem is that these genes all act alone, each in competition with the other. Well, they don't. And as all scientists involved know, and as he himself admitted later, genes act among others with cooperation. They, to pick it out as, to kick each of them out, as being a solitary agent is quite mad. And it's the kind of madness which a powerful theorist often do use when they are carried away by their own thoughts. And the, you see, twice in the self-esteem, he says, "Of course, we can overcome this. We have free will after all." But the rest of the time, he's saying that we are bumbling robots. And, yeah. Mary, do you think that in a sort of literal day-to-day sense, people gouging their way through careers in banking and the market and so on, are thinking themselves, "Well, I am behaving in a Darwinian fashion. What I am doing is natural and just, and therefore, this kind of rhetoric really does undermine the moral fabric of life." Well, this rhetoric is used all the time by the people who describe. It's used by perfectly ordinary people who wish to justify something that's going on. And even when they don't use the word "selfish," the whole story of evolution at present is used in that sense as being one-sided in this manner. And, sorry, rhetoric isn't a minor matter, right? No, it's one of the animates with. Mary, by coincidence, I went to listen to Richard Dawkins earlier this week. I sometimes think that you are a little unkind on him because his main bugbear at the moment, I think, is not the sort of kropokian view of evolution, the idea that we evolved through mutual aid. The main thing he is aiming at is irrational religion, which, and there, by and large, I'm with Dawkins. What I like about your philosophy is so optimistic. The idea that we are, by nature, sociable and rational creatures. I mean, I love that. I think that's, and living in an orderly society and watching the way people behave around you, you can believe it. I do wonder if, let's say, we were living in Poland in 1940 or in Bosnia in 1996, whether it would be possible to continue to believe, as you do, that human beings are, by nature, sociable and rational. Well, Darwin, who put forward this more cheerful view, was not being unrealistic. He said an awful lot of the time, of course. The other motives get the better of this, but he was looking at the general tenor, which has made human life possible on the scale that it is, has made social life possible at all, has to take an underlying layer of co-operativeness. We couldn't have got where we are, if that were not simply the general truth, awful though things frequently become. Roy had to sleep. Could I just say how much I enjoy it? I thought it was marvellous. I particularly enjoyed the way you took apart Dawkins' logic, these things were inevitable, so let's avoid them. But the wonderful thing, from my point of view, was the relationship of selfishness and the enlightenment. As one of those things you read it, and you think I always knew this, of course, you didn't always know it, but when you would say it, it's so clear that you think you should have known it. I suddenly realized how important that was. I looked up Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations yesterday, and it's full of apparition of selfishness. The reason that you get the best and cheapest nails is because the nail-maker selfishly wants to make a profit. It is the absolute proclamation that selfishness makes the world go round. That's been interpreted, I think, in all sorts of ways you describe. He also wrote the theory of moral sentiments, however, which goes in a rather different direction. Well, I don't know that, but I do know that the Wealth of Nations that I looked at yesterday talked about selfishness, you did the word continually, and that's been misinterpreted, in my view, and in your view, too, and I think the more this can be disseminated, the better society it will be. Yes, I wondered whether your book puts a magnifying glass over maybe a problem with science in general, which is that the drive of scientists is to break down the natural world to the smallest possible unit, and then, once they've found that, they will build the hypothesis around that small unit. Now, I wonder whether that's actually a floor in the empirical method, because organisms don't work from the smallest unit, do they? The scientists, their motivation, their drive is to find what is the smallest unit? Yes, Richard, that's very important, I think. You see, Darwin, who, after all, was a scientist, did not make this mistake, and in fact, it's become much more prevalent, I think, in recent times. This kind of reduction to the atoms is a matter, I think, of the other sciences trying to imitate the success of physics, but the success of Newtonian physics, which dealt with separate atoms, you see, since that, in those days, atoms were billion balls, they were entirely distinct. Since that time, physicists have come round to seeing that there are no such separate particles, and they talk in terms of forces and fields, and God knows what, but the biologists, I think, are still trying to imitate the success of Newtonian science by finding some atoms, and genes seems to me to be a crashing example, that's a difficult mistake. Can I ask you, I love the cover, and people can't see the cover, but it's based on David Friedrich. That's what I wanted to know, why did you choose that cover, which, of course, has got two individuals standing. My publishers came up with it and said, isn't it nice to have not one but two solitary centers? I think that's really cheapy and rather brilliant. I think it's very haunting, just to Kate, Germanic gentleman, looking out at sea, as the sun goes up or down, I can't really tell. We're going to move on now to a decade which has been labelled as a decade of selfishness or individualism, or whatever, a decade through which we have all lived and have different memories in the 1980s. Andy McSmith, you've had a go at trying to bring together the whole meaning of the 1980s, and I wonder, because we think of it in terms of dramatic moments, particularly the early days. The early Thatcher budget, very like today, the sense of austerity and everything's got to be cut back, and then the Falklands warn the miners' strike and so on. Do we miss the message of the decade, which is the six or seven years of high spending, high consumption and so on that followed that? Well, I think the significant thing that happened is something that Roy mentioned earlier. We now live in an age where there is no ideology in politics that is extremely difficult to tell what differentiates one political party from another. Now, that certainly wasn't true 30 years ago, and if you ask when did the age of ideology end, I would say it ended when the miners went back to work in the summer of 1985, because for better or for worse, there was a Thatcherite settlement that landed on this country, and it has never really been properly challenged since, not during 13 years of Labour government. So the idea of a decade of greed is slightly misleading, because the 80s was two completely different halves, the first half, there was a sort of ideological struggle going on, and you can't talk about the early 80s as the decade agreed. If that description applies, and it applies to what happens after 85 when, for the most part, people gave up thinking about what kind of society we wanted to live in, because the Thatcherite victory seems so settled and supreme, and people, a lot of people just thought, well, it's fun to make money. There's a wonderful underlying narrative beginning here about unexpected results. If Richard Dawkins, who'd become a sort of hero to the liberal left, if I'm using that phrase, is to be blamed for individualist market excesses, then Margaret Thatcher, who thought that she was a moralist, thought that she was going to get rid of the state in order to recreate a more moral, and in many respects, Christian country, is being blamed for the atomisation and the greed of the selfishness which followed the breakup of parts of that state. Well, Thatcher genuinely did say there is no such thing as a society. One of the wonderful things about researching Thatcher's life is every time you've heard some quotation that's been attributed to, you find she actually said it. She did then go on to say, but there's families and individuals. She did, there was a rider to the phrase, wasn't it? Yes, but I don't think any Dawkins would deny that there are families and there are individuals, but she denied that there was such a thing as a society. Now, I think there were a lot of unintended consequences about what she did, because I can't believe that Thatcher, with her upbringing in Grantham and her shopkeeper father, really wanted to see a world in which people lived on so much borrowed money, but she created it. I can't think that her father would have approved, it was the way that his grandson makes money or wandering around the world being involved in rather strange arms deals, but Mrs Thatcher made that sort of world possible. So there are a lot of unintended consequences. I would just add one other thing about the 80s is even though the right of the Conservative Party won the economic argument, in my view, the repressive authoritarian right that the Tory party didn't win the argument about how about society. Well, this is the great irony. She gave people freedom to do lots of things she disapproved of strongly. Yeah, that's right. I mean, for instance, one obvious measure is how what happened to gay rights during the 80s. And in fact, the situation of gays by the end of the decade was so much better than it had been at the beginning, despite the arrival of AIDS, which was a terrible thing to happen. So that you sometimes hear that when they introduced clause 28, which made it illegal for councils to promote homosexuality, that this was a setback for gays. It was no such thing, it was a self-defense defeat at the party party. Your book, of course, describes all sorts of aspects of life in the 1980s, the music and the television and the sport and so on as well. But the impression I got at the end of it was that you thought that in many respects in the year 2010, we are still living in the 1980s. I think that's true. I mean, obviously, the gadgetry is completely different to me, the things you have in your house and nothing like what was there 30 years ago. But politically, we are living in a settlement that we arrived at in '85, right? And the idea that Mr. Thatchu brought to an end the real ideological argument, because I think in a sense, the Labour Party had done that in the Cabbens, which I would remember. The Labour Party's ideology was very largely based on two practicalities. One is the virtue of public expenditure and the Labour Party lost faith in that during the IMF crisis and the second was the virtue of trade unions and the trade unions lost that aura during the winter of discontent. But Mr. Thatchu in a strange way brings ideology in. It's not that we don't have ideology in politics at the moment, it's that we all have the same ideology. And the ideology, I think Andy actually says, it's difficult to define what Thatchu stands for, said it's on the authority of Nigel Lawson, who are used to shadowing the chancellor. Nigel knew what Thatchu stands stood for, and said he'd invented it, which was basically the market of the determinate, not simply of efficiency, but the best way to allocate resources, and the breakdown of corporate responsibility, collective responsibility. And that now all pervades society, which says something quite complementary about Mr. Thatchu, if great politicians change the weather, my god, Mr. Thatchu changed the weather, and it's still raining, because people still believe that, people still believe that. And why was it that the Labour generation afterwards didn't yank the weather back in your view? Well, I think very many of the Labour Party leaders who followed, I hope I can be absorbed from this, we're still fighting the battles of the 70s and 80s, we're still terrified, I think Tony Blair left number 10, tell you five that Looney left wingers were going to return and take over the Labour Party, and they were destroyed by Neil Kinnequin, some of us helped him, but earlier than that. Secondly, society has become very middle class, and the Labour Party had a ideology in its early days, because it represented the class interest of the working class. It didn't know it was an ideology, but by doing what the working class needed and wanted, it had an ideological framework, where when the working class disappeared, that disappeared as well. Yes, everybody believed in the market, didn't they believed in it in quite a religious sense, and that is what you know, what people rely on, what they trust, what they think will carry them through, and that's been a little bit shaken in the last two years, but they're really not so much. The market did deliver a lot of people, a materially richer life, did it not? I mean, you may argue that it was in terms of community, and society, more meager, but in terms of actual stuff around them, it seems to produce a coin, well, this really depends, the extension of very middle-school pen, this is a little book, is the spirit level, the book that tells many people have been made more prosperous, but have they been more contented, have they been made happier, and the market's made people a lot more prosperous, but I'm not sure it's made what Tony Croft would call the more tranquil society, I think the more tranquil society is not brought about by, the more, there's got to be market, nobody's suggesting market can be abolished, but the market is a dominant force in economics, and the invariably right force in economics doesn't produce tranquility. I was going to say yet we are now back in a situation where taxation has gone back up again, where there is certainly a discussion about raining in the market, in banking and financial terms. People believe in it in a much deeper sense than thinking that it'll probably keep that money going, they think that, and I think this is now linked with the idea of evolution and progress, as a genuine force unmeathings, which knows what it's doing, and I think it is much more religious than that, and I have a general view that if you knock religion out through the door it comes in through the window, and I think this is what's happening. But the other great thing about the market is it's never wrong, if you believe in the market you're always right, a few people are made unemployed, if you're accompanied to your bankrupt, but that's how the market works, it's always right. It's a bit like Leninism to that extent, you know, it's all, the revolution is on its way and it's paradise is coming, so it's a turn into monodress. Marxists, there's plenty of those, yes, few of them I think I mentioned in Andy's book. Yeah, well what I'd say about the market is if it's run badly, it certainly has a part of aggravate you, if you can't get a telephone in your house, which a lot of people couldn't 30 years ago, it's very annoying, but having a working telephone in your house is convenient, but it doesn't make you happy, and I think that's what a well-run free market does, it takes out a lot of petty annoyances and gives you, leaves you free to find a way to be happy, but it doesn't offer you happiness, it doesn't. Well let's turn now to a subject which certainly involves some kind of twisted idealism and ways of creating a better island, they thought, which is the story of the IRA, but particularly the IRA in New York, which is the subject to Richard Bean's new play, The Big Feller. Richard, this play, you had the idea of this play after being in New York yourself relatively soon after 9/11 I think. Yeah I went to New York on Kevin Space's Money with a few other playwrights, and I think we would kick around the ideas, the idea of writing 9/11 plays, and of course that was a ridiculous thing to try and do three or four months after the event, but I spent 10 days in New York, it was the first time I'd been there, I spent 10 days there, and what I realized, which I think I knew but it hadn't bubbled to the surface if you like, which is that New York's kind of an Irish town really, in the sense that the police and port authority, the fireman, pretty much everybody you meet in a uniform would claim Irish ancestry, and of course I would solidly, I mean I grew up with the trouble in the north, where the trouble's 30 years of it, we all grew up with it didn't we, and I think we all also knew solidly that apart from Gaddafi's occasional interventions supplying arms, it was basically the Americans that were bankroll in the whole project, so I sat in the Chelsea hotel as writers do, thinking I cannot write a play about 9/11, this is ridiculous, I'm going to write about the moral compromises that these Irish Americans have made by joining a terrorist outfit, so my 9/11 play as it were, my New York 9/11 play is basically about the IRA, which is it's a kind of a bleak way of dealing with it, so it starts on St Patrick's Day after 1972 Bloody Sunday, obviously, and it ends, the last scene is 9/11, so the two are linked, but it's really a discussion of political violence I'd like to think, you know, and in the play there are at least a couple of, I would have thought, naturally violent, and in one case, homicidal, insane people, I'm thinking of the older Irishman who just loves violence. Yeah, well I wanted to, I mean obviously when one writes a play like this one has to do some research, and I didn't go down the falls road knocking on doors and asking two interview people, this Brit playwright wants to, so there's an enormous amount of literature on the IRA, and all kind of archives in Boston University strange, which is very telling actually if you think about it, is the centre for IRA studies is Boston, but basically the characters in the play represent the kind of range of terrorists that you get, there are mad people who enjoy killing, and they're basically sidecoats, and then the most interesting character I think is the big fella himself who is driven by an ideology, and he says a clear moral purpose. Let's explain who this is, this is an American, not an Irishman really. Yeah, he's an American, he's born in New Jersey, and to Irish ancestry, but he decides that he's Irish if you like, and he joins all the hypernia societies in New York and whatever, but basically he ends up running what is an organisation analogous to NORADE, essentially, which is, he raises money to buy unlike rifles and whatever, and NORADE have always denied they had any involvement with that, but when Gerry Adams sent Brendan Hughes to New York, he gave him NORADE's phone numbers, Brendan Hughes met NORADE, and they offered him rifles, so I'm sorry NORADE, you know, you can't deny that, so he's basically, he calls himself the big fella because he wants to be the Michael Collins of America, you know, and this, what's interesting there is that there is a kind of vanity about that, he wants, he's partly in this organisation, partly organising the IRA in New York, because he wants to be in the history books, it's a selfish, it's a kind of selfish thing, backed up by this clear moral purpose, he's a nationalist of course, a clear moral purpose for a nationalist would be to, and I mean the other interesting theme politically I thought in this was how reactionary in many respects nationalism of that kind is, I mean it's certainly associated, keep women in their place, have the long, you know, it's macho, sentimentalist, romantic, backward looking in almost every respect, and yet again it was one of the ideologies that the so-called left seemed to applaud for a while. And because it's in New York, all of those things are magnified, because the Irish character, the Rory character, he's very dismissive of Ireland, he kind of, you know, like you leave your hometown, you're very dismissive of your hometown, he leaves Ireland, goes to America, and I think America's great in Ireland, it's raining all the time, all those usual things that people have. Yes, well I thought this was sort of appalling insight into what could happen, these people are, as you say, Americans, so plenty of other causes they could go in for, they choose this, and as you say, once they're inside it, they're really interested in climbing in it, I found it, I have to say, very alarming, but it's an insight perhaps, which we ought to have, and I mean, the other people who are just followers, once you get to be a follower and you've got someone who says, "He is the big fella, you'll tie a hook, don't you?" Yeah, well, the Michael character, I think you're talking about the Michael character, who is just a foot soldier and a pawn, if you like, in the whole game, and then he comes out as a really dangerous person because he just never makes a moral decision, doesn't it? Is it? Is it a play about terrorism in general, Irish terrorism in particular? I think the former, I think it's a play about terrorism in general, I mean, I think, you know, NORADE of course is, as I say, it's not, is the organisation the metaphor for it, I suppose, but if you look at how do we support our own ideologies through charities, I mean, you can look at Kashmiri charities or Palestinian charities or whatever, how much are they NORADE, you know, these are questions which I think individuals have to ask, I, you know, I'm very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but I would not give money to a Palestinian charity, I would, I've done work for Human Rights Watch, which are really tough on the Israelis, and to do that through the law, because they just don't know where your money's going, kind of thing, don't you? But it is particularly good, I don't mean to say I'm patronising on the Irishness of the Americans, I remember being when I lived just outside Boston campaigning for Mayor White and going to some fire brigade precinct, and all they did was saying, I'm saying Irish songs all night, and we're killed, you'll never see an Irishman in a kill, but the Irish Americans were killed. I must say, Richard, what I really liked about this was unlike a lot of political plays, which can be very didactic, here you actually had character, and everybody, with one small exception, everybody begins either a scene or a play, or the play in one place and ends up somewhere completely different. But there is one question I just wanted to ask you, you said you did archival research, you haven't just alleged that these people were involved in gunrunning, you've actually alleged that Irish groups in America were involved in murder, you've got a slang word there, you say, Mexico, and you also alleged that they were so infiltrated by the FBI. I should explain, going to Mexico, being sent to Mexico, meant you were going to be executed. Rob, don't. You also imply that they were so infiltrated by the FBI, the FBI could have stopped all this, if they wanted to. Now, is that fact that you've dug up from the archives, or is that a bit of poetic license? Well, the whole place of work of the imagination, but each character is based on certain individuals, like for instance Rory Odrescole is based on Joe Doherty, who had a street named after him in New York, and all of that. So almost every individual is based on a certain person. The CIA, actually, not the FBI, busted a cell in New York, and took them all to court, they all went to prison, they all went to court, and every single member of the cell's defence in court was, I'm a member of the CIA, I've been working for the CIA, that's why I stayed in the air, and they all got off. Could I read another moral question, the play rate? You try to think between terrorism, which kills belligerents, and terrorism, which kills innocent civilians. Do I draw the play does the play does? Well, there's a, there's a scene where the Irish guys sit on the sofa and discuss islamist terrorism, don't they? Yes. And they, it's, they say, look, the way we do it is the right way to do it. We give warnings, we don't, we're not suicide bombers, we have military targets. And then of course, comes Omar. You see the real big fellow Collins, always prided himself that he only attacked military targets, never kills civilians, shot a lot of soldiers, many of them in their beds, but I'm not sure there is a great distinction between the two, but your play resins in a very interesting way. I was, I was certainly, I mean, I think the portrayal of the, the sort of social nature of terrorism, it certainly echoes all sorts of people from Conrad, through to people who've looked at his limits themselves, the sort of clammy male comradeship, and they get something out of it, don't they? It defines them themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that hasn't been too much clammy male comradeship, I heard around the table today. We have right now some time. Thank you to all my guests today. Richard Bean's new play, we've just been talking about the big fella, is on at the Lyric, Hammersmith in London for the next four weeks before it goes on to around the country. Andy McSmith's No Such Thing as Society, and Mary Midgley's The Solitary Self, Darwin and The Selfish Gene are both out now, and so is Roy Hattersley's biography of David Lloyd George, the greater outsider. Next week, we're going to be talking about fairness. Will Hutton, pleads for more of it, while the hedge fund manager Lars Kreuer defends his profession's apparent lack of it, and the screenwriter Billy Ivory celebrates the women workers at the Ford diagonum plant who fought for equal pay, made in diagonum. But for now, made in London, thank you,