Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics. Today, I'm talking to Ed Miliband,

and we're discussing how political change really happens.

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I recorded this conversation with Ed Millerand at the end of last week.

He is in his Doncaster constituency as we're speaking.

I'm in Cambridge.

We're talking about, but not only about, his new book, which is called Go Big, How to Fix Our World.

It comes out of his podcast, Reasons to Be Cheerful, a podcast that

I've been on, and he and Jeff Lloyd, his co-host, have been on Talking Politics too. They

canvass the big ideas that they think could make the world a better place, give us reasons

to be cheerful. This book tries to distill them and turn them into not a program but an argument for change. And that's

where we start. Ed, this book is about big ideas and it's about all the ways we could do

politics differently. But towards the end, you say, and I hope I get this right, you say not just

one of the conclusions, but the big conclusion you want people to take away is that

politics is too important to be left up to the politicians. And I wonder how you feel about that.

So you're writing this partly as a sort of podcaster, ideas person, but you're also a professional

politician. Yeah. So how do you feel as a professional politician? Does it make you feel

that your job radically needs to change?

Should you be giving power away? Should you be persuading your colleagues to be giving power away?

How do you feel about that, given you're on the other side of that line, and I'm not?

...