Hello, I'm Stephen, and I'm Armando.

And in this second special episode of the New States and podcast, we'll be joined by government

homelessness adviser, Dame Louise Casey, and police officer turned environmental activist

Paul Stevens to discuss activism in British politics, is it better to be inside or outside

the Westminster tent to bring about change?

Armando, why are we discussing activism in this episode?

Why, indeed.

This is crucial, I think, because I think a lot of the frustration in politics boils

down to people feeling that they're not being heard within Westminster, irrespective

of where you sit in the political spectrum or have any political party affiliations.

But I've noticed in the last four or five years, and specifically more recently, maybe

because of the pandemic, we've been picking up on the value, I think, of local community

involvement, community behaviour.

I noticed, also, if party politics, people are becoming a bit more cynical about it, I

think they're not cynical about politics, but maybe they're drawn more towards single

issue politics.

There, I think, the passion and the enthusiasm and the commitment is for campaigning on

un-single issues.

So I just thought, given that this has now played such a major role in our political debate

at the moment, it's worth spending a bit more time looking at it.

I suppose the other kind of interesting thing about all of this is, yeah, I think about

if I was starting university now, I was politically engaged, would I join a political party,

...