Welcome to Sharp Talk, the regular podcast of E Sharp Magazine. Go to eSharp.U for free access to all the podcasts to date.

This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with Robert Peston. Robert Peston is ITV's political editor and host of the Sunday morning politics show, Peston on Sunday.

Robert, you have a new book out, WTF, what the expletive, whiskey tango fox trot, what do you want to call it.

I know it's not ostensibly about Brexit, but it is a theme recurring, but we won't start by talking about Brexit,

but you do paint a pretty grim picture of the United Kingdom

as your kind of opening gambit it's declining social mobility increasing inequality

wage stagnation is it all of a sudden this has come to your attention or has that been

sort of brewing in your head for quite some time before you put pen to paper as it were

so for years now I have obviously been thinking about these issues of fairness,

or rather the way that the global economy has operated now for two or three decades is increasingly perceived to be

unfair by millions of people in the rich West who happen to be on middle to low incomes

because the reality is that those people have done badly out of globalisation.

And particularly since the great crisis of 2007 and 8,

then the Eurozone crisis, you know, things have got considerably worse for those on middle to low incomes.

And so this has been a preoccupation of mine for some time.

Actually, my previous book, How Do We Fix This Mess, was really all about the economic aspects of all of that.

The reason I wrote WTF was actually directly related to Brexit. I hate getting things wrong. I didn't

expect the British people to vote for Brexit. So in that sense, I got quite a big thing wrong.

And so one of the motives writing the book was to try and understand why you know a majority

of people not a huge majority but a you know a majority nonetheless of British voters chose to go for

Brexit and why as I say my own analysis of how it would go turned out to be flawed.

Without being oversimplicity, there are basically two parts of one of the analysis,

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