Hello my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. Today I'm talking to Ed Miller

band and we're discussing how political change really happens.

Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Reviewer Books, a literary

magazine full of politics and a political magazine full of literature.

Listeners can subscribe at a special rate of just one pound an issue by using URL lrb.me-talk.

That's lrb.me-talk.

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

He is in his Dunkest Thuconstiturancy as we're speaking. I'm in Cambridge. We're talking

about but not only about his new book which is called GoBig 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. I wonder how you feel about that. You're writing this partly as a

podcast that ideas person but you're also a professional politician. 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? I mean I'm sure I'm

we should be doing that. I suppose the primary sense in which I mean this is that and I've always

...