Hello, I'm Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA.

Welcome to the Intelligence Squared Podcast.

You can sign up for regular updates about podcasts and other events

at Intelligence Squared.com.

Now I'm delighted to be here with James Bloodworth journalist and author of

Hired six months undercover in low-wage Britain which I've just finished I've

finished the final chapter James on the Tube this morning. I timed it

absolutely perfectly. So it's a book in which you spend time in various places,

ruelly in the West Midlands, Blackpool,

South Wales, London, living the life

of the kind of new precarious.

So we're going to get into all of that and your

experiences and your reflections and talk about the future work and I can't

resist also talking to you about the future of the left given that you've got a

kind of background in political journalism and commentary.

But let's start with the obvious place which is, you know, describe to me the moment

when the decision, you made the decision to write this book and to put yourself through some quite exacting circumstances.

I suppose it was back in the end of 2015.

I was, there was a lot in the news at the time about the economy going from

strength to strength. There was we were on the road to recovery after a

long recession. The employment's the number of people in work it was quite

buoyant if you looked at the figures of people getting jobs.

...