Hello and welcome to the bunker your need to know on news and politics five days a week. I'm Ros Taylor. Where do you even begin?

That's how it feels when you start thinking about how to tackle all that's wrong with the UK.

Hospitals, courts, the climate emergency, the housing shortage.

Still, we can now dare to hope that these problems are going to be tackled,

and someone with plenty of ideas for how to do so joins me in the studio today.

Polly Toonbe is a guardian columnist and co-author of The Only Way Is Up,

how to take Britain from austerity to prosperity.

Welcome to the bunker Polly.

Hello.

There's a sentence in your book that I think is very important and actually key to understanding

the rest of the book.

Its fiscal ignorance can be challenged.

Tell me what you meant by that.

Ignorance has guided the last government over the last 14 years because they haven't wanted

to know they've had no curiosity. Social policy,

social research has all been ditched. Academics, desperate that nobody pays any

attention to what they have to say. no advice, remember Michael Gov saying we've had enough of experts

and the lack of any expertise, they're being driven by gut instinct, by ideology, by policies that feel fun to them or are going to attract

people on their side of the argument, and no sense of responsibility about what's really going to make

this happen what's going to make this work. It was all performative it was all

how's this going to seem can I get this on to the 10 o'clock news and that is

really depressing that if you're interested in social policy which is what I've done all my life

...