Hello and welcome to O-God What Now. I'm Ros Taylor, wishing I was living

in Zapin Marbea with two swimming pools in a paint box, but stuck at home instead, with

a COVID-19 year old. Never mind, first week of this week's panel. Ian Dunn's is economist

at the I and author of How to Be a Liberal. Hi Ian. Hello, hello, hello. Brexit Bulldog

Steve Baker has shared his reading list on Twitter and it includes some heavy hitters, including

Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. I wonder if Baker is actually read the Open Society

and its enemies. Tell us what's behind this for you into political theory. Well, I imagine

he wants to make himself look cleverer than he actually is and more literate. I think

if you got like a little blade runner thing where you can just zoom in the screen over

and over, you can see that the spines of those books are largely unbroken and none of them

look like they've been read in the history of time. If you read them, of course, I mean,

the rest of them higher can order that, I mean, you can find quite, but you know, you

look bonnemizes and it's like fine, okay, you know, you've brought me a nine. Popper,

he doesn't fucking get to have popper and if he had, if he had, he might have come across

the sense where the central idea is in the Open Society, which is not so much this value

of freedom in its own right, but this idea that like freedom makes for a more efficient

country, for a more efficient system, because you know, all policies have kind of unintended

consequences. And as long as you open up to make sure that you can hear as many critical

voices as possible, you might be able to work out what those unintended consequences

are and respond to them and run your society in a better way. And I can't imagine what

it was about the events of this week watching someone stand on a stage and saying, fuck

me, look what we've done with this Irish protocol, which might have brought that into my mind

...