Ask Me Anything: The Bastard Answers

Your questions answered.

Photo by kevs on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to the first ever Ask Me Anything answers page. These are occasional features in which I answer whatever the hell you ask me, the weirder the better. As I said when I unveiled it, every week I do this one lucky person will get a free paid subscription to Striking 13, as a reward for asking the Question of the Week. This will get them absolutely fuck all.

Naomi Alderman

Having been onstage with you, I found you have a quality of very intense *listening*, which made for a very enjoyable conversation (apart from everything else that made the conversation enjoyable!). I would love to read a piece by you on the skills of interviewing, and being interviewed. What are you listening for, when you’re interviewing someone? What have you learned from being interviewed?

OK I should say right at the start that I am a terrible public interviewer. I’ve done it a few times, in much the same capacity as Naomi interviewed me and Dorian - for a book event. Naomi is brilliant at it. Annoyingly that seems to apply to everything she does - someone really needs to put a stop to that shit. I, however, have accepted that I am just not very good at it. I’m a good interviewer in private, I think, but not in public. So I’ll talk about the bit I’m better at.

Private interviews are usually conducted in a pub, an office or at home. This is when you interview someone for an article or a book. Generally I am doing one of two things: Trying to understand something, or trying to make the copy more colourful with pacey quotes.

The most important thing is that you have the confidence to proudly state your ignorance. I am usually interviewing people who are experts. The first time I ask them to repeat what they have just explained is fine, the third is awkward and the fourth is just fucking tiresome to them. But I need to be honest when I haven’t got something or I can’t explain it to someone else and sometimes it takes me ages. It took me years to have that confidence, to be able to say: No, I do not understand. I wish I had this earlier. If you pretend to understand out of politeness, you’re fucked. You have failed.

Other times, the interview has a different function. I am not trying to find something out. I know how the underlying thing works - customs, statutory instruments, the harm principle, whatever. But I need to give it more life. These are interviews where I’m quoting someone and I want to use their commentary to give it more momentum. In these cases I basically go drinking with them. You often have to do several interviews until you find someone who has charisma on the page. This is different to having charisma in real life, although they often overlap.

I tend to do these interviews off the record, so that people relax and don’t censor themselves. Then I send the person a transcript of what I want to use and give them the right to delete, rephrase, or make certain bits anonymous.

In terms of being interviewed, it depends on the context. On TV the main thing I value is clarity: Who is this question to, what is it about, really basic stuff. This is because all anyone wants from you on TV is quick grabbable two-minute soundbites. We are engaged in clarity. At a book festival or on a podcast, it is very different. You ideally want to actually be present and have a real conversation. Hopefully the interviewer will be asking things they haven’t written down, hopefully I’ll be saying things that aren’t just a reformulation of what’s in the book. Hopefully we’ll all stop performing and think and talk. But that is vanishingly rare. It needs extremely confident interviewees and interviewers.

My one bit of discipline is to stop when a question is asked and actually think about what I am going to say. It’s a good test.

Douglas

So much of political discourse is around how little money there is to spend on public services in the UK and that is given as a reason for tax rises and other measures sometimes giving rise to wholesale austerity. And yet as Prof Richard Murphy opines often it is literally impossible for a Govt in UK to go bust as it can in reality spend what it likes as it has its own Central Bank that must give it money by creating it as ordered by an Act of Parliament. Nor does the Govt need to wait for tax receipts either. So why do they indulge in the silly Thatcheresque game of pretending the UK economy is like a housewife’s purse? They are making a political choice and pretending their hands are tied. They can spend, it would be very popular and would prob increase tax receipts so why don’t they? Is it only to keep gross inequality?

Anon

I’d like to ask your views on the wealth taxes being proposed by people like Gary Stevenson which the Green Party seems to have adopted as policy. And, more generally, if you think, from a liberal perspective, that wealth redistribution is necessary, possible or even desirable in context of growing economic inequality?

Anon

Are the constraints on sensible taxation, like - taxing the rich, the banks, energy companies or fighting tax avoidance by tech companies - simply that the market will punish the country, the pound drops, debt gets more expensive, let alone capital flight and millionaires leaving?

Just lumping a few economics questions together here. I’m not an economist and I am terrible at it but here goes. First, I absolutely accept and want wealth redistribution. In particular there needs to be urgent action to alter the inequality of asset ownership. This is the real faultline, the new class system, and it needs to be spoken about far more often than it is. The fact we talk about immigration more than this is utterly damning.

However, some of the chat that does the rounds online is obvious nonsense. It’s simply not true that we can spend what we like and it’ll be fine because the Bank of England will print money. Quite apart from any inflationary impact, the problem with this type of view is that it acts as if reputation does not matter and has no consequence. It does. That must be very clear to us now after the Liz Truss debacle and if it isn’t I honestly don’t know what will make it so. The interest rate on a bond is not a conspiracy. It is a designation of risk, of the type that we ourselves would have if we were lending money. You can get the Bank of England to do things at gunpoint if you want to be all Chavez about it, but you will not be able to control the way you are seen by others for doing so or the impact that has on your finances.

This is why fiscal rules are a good idea, but you need to have the right rule. Of course, they are a fiction. But then everything is a fiction - countries, money, the state, my mental wellbeing. They are part of a confidence trick which governments play with markets to provide assurance. As it happens, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules are good - opening up long-term investment but balancing day-to-day spending. They are much much better and more progressive than what we had before.

The wealth tax issue is really difficult. Capturing wealth is hard. You will need to put a tax on all potential assets - so not just property and pensions, but also art and whisky barrels and things like that. You need to quickly and without warning capture all the weird little ways people will squirrel it away. If it is annual, you will need a massive ongoing valuation programme. Honestly, I don’t really see the point of all that when we already have a wealth tax of sorts and a system for collecting it. It is called capital gains. My preference is that we make it higher, then we talk about more imaginative solutions when we have exhausted the obvious ones.

It’s easier to inspire people with a big new shiny tax than it is a boring old reform of the existing system, but it is not necessarily more effective. For instance, we are about to put a lot of effort into a mansion tax. This will involve new property valuations and a few years of minor churn and uncertainty at the top end of the property market. The sum result is that it’ll bring in around half a billion quid. Fuck all. What we need is full reform of the existing council tax valuations, which would bring fairness to property taxation in general. But it is much easier to distract the public with the theatre of redistribution than it is to meaningfully engage in the work which would make it real.

The thing that concerns me about the Polansky rhetoric, and that of the left in general at the moment, is this stuff about the 1%, or billionaires. The basic mathematical reality is that we cannot solve our problems by only hitting billionaires. We just can’t. Do it, fine - I’m up for it. I don’t have much sympathy for billionaires. But we will need to tax the middle class more. The 1% rhetoric tells people: You will not be affected, we’re not talking about you, it’ll be someone higher up the food chain. And by doing so it perpetuates the Thatcherite mentality which has done so much damage - creating a public which only accepts tax rises for other people and a political class which therefore is too cowardly to have an honest conversation about it.

Dom

What was the first album that changed you?

Olympian by Gene. There were many albums that came later, of course, which had a much greater impact, but this was the first. I was about 13 I suppose, when I first heard the title track on the radio. It is the first moment I can remember being overcome by beauty. I already liked music - I was obsessed with Michael Jackson - but this was different. It was instantly more profound. I remember it as a transcendent moment. This was my first contact with music as something almost religious. I was moved to tears.

I ran up to the radio afterwards hoping to find out which band it was, but they never said. I was crestfallen. These were pre-internet days so I had nothing to go on. I presumed that I would never hear them again. Then one day, a couple years later, I was in a friend’s room when they put the song on. I couldn’t believe my luck, to have stumbled on it again. So yeah, that’s how I discovered that album, which I then obviously listened to to death, in the way you did back when you were young. You lose the joy of repetition when you’re older.

People are often disparaging about Gene but I still think that album is absolute quality. Most importantly, it taught about ascendant beauty in music - those moments you sometimes get, and can still have as an adult, where music raises something in you, when it does things that cannot be encapsulated in words.

Pete Carroll

As someone who has spent a lifetime working in music I’d love to know what’s in your record collection and is there a record or an artist/band that opened a door for you.

There’s a lot in there. Roughly speaking it’s a third all-time classics, a third whatever is coming out now that I like, and a third British indie music between 1990-2005. I know that this is not an accurate representation of musical quality. Does any record collection really need five different Shed Seven albums? Obviously not. But at some point you have to come to terms with the fact that you will always return to the music you listened to as a teenager and that’s OK. Ideally, you shouldn’t get stuck there. But it’s fine to go home for a while. I’ve made my peace with it.

The album that really opened a door to me was The Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers. I was a really depressed unhappy kid - chronically discontented and troublesome and full of angst. That album basically saved my life. It made me feel less alone. But it also did one other thing, which was to turn me onto other kinds of music.

They would stuff the sleeve notes with quotes. One of them was from Chuck D. I can still remember it in full: “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me… Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp.” Loved it. That led me to Public Enemy, which led me to hip hop, which opened me up to drum and bass and all sorts of other things. I fucking loved sleeve notes. They were such a gateway and an education. It’s a real loss that people don’t really do them anymore.

Lewis

Hi Ian, subscriber and Origin Story Patreon so I hope this comes across respectfully. You were so noticeably vocal and outspoken about the Ukraine invasion and calling for govt to step up. Then Oct 8th and the resulting genocide and you are far less conspicuous in commentary and calls for action by comparison. I guess my question is why, in relative terms, the differing approach to the two defining foreign policy issues of our time.

This is a fair question. I’ll almost certainly upset people on all sides of this with the answer but I’ll give it as honestly as I can.

First, I do think there are distinctions. Israel’s attack on Gaza was pathological, disproportionate, and I think in several instances constituted a war crime. But it was a response to an attack on Israel, one that was of immense savagery and brutality. If you read work by Israelis themselves, you’ll understand just how profound its impact was.

I also believe that attacks against Jews have a specific quality. They are part of a lineage, a long story of various attempts to murder Jewish people. They are not to be treated as isolated events, disconnected from the history in which they take place. Part of my insistence on this literally comes from doing Origin Story. It is almost impossible for us to do an episode without talking about anti-semitism, because it is everywhere, all the time.

There is therefore a qualitative moral difference between Israel’s attack on Gaza and Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which was completely unprovoked.

Similarly, there is a distinction between the kind of endstate outcome you would envisage in each one, or which would be morally acceptable.

In the Middle East a moral endstate involves a peace process with two sides having their rights, safety and humanity realised. I know how pat and Hallmarks this is, but it is true and I will not stop saying it: Both sides of the Middle East dispute are legitimate. Israelis deserve a home where they are safe. Palestinians deserve self-determination in a viable contiguous state.

In Ukraine, on the other hand, the moral outcome involves the expulsion of the aggressor from the land he has tried to conquer. It is a much simpler situation. This is also true strategically. A Putin victory in Ukraine would mean a step towards a much larger war in Europe. I wish people who have tired of Ukraine would recognise how much less they will like it if Ukraine falls and the front line moves decisively towards us.

There is also a different role for Britain in each context. In Ukraine, we can do a lot. We can arm, we can train, we can fund, we can assist and we can strengthen Zelenskyy diplomatically. In Israel, we have very little influence. The basic reality is that Israel will ignore what Britain does. We should still do it - I do not think you can justify supplying defence equipment to Israel, for instance. But let’s not be under any illusions about how impactful those decisions are.

These distinctions are not just intellectual. They are emotional. They are why my response to Ukraine is outrage and a sense of mission.My response to the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness and deep-seated despair.

For what it’s worth, I did repeatedly criticise Israel’s actions in firm terms - on social media, on radio, in podcasts, at live shows and on TV. But you are certainly right that there is a different emotional tenor to my commentary on this issue than Ukraine and probably less frequency in the commentary.

Final word on this: I used to have different views on Israel. My principle was that nothing good can ever come from a state based on a race or religion, a principle that applied to Pakistan as much as it did Israel. I still broadly hold that view but it has become much more complicated. I used to think that Israel should probably be turned into a mixed state with no demographic preference but individual rights for all - basically a one-state solution.

What changed? Corbynism. I thought anti-semitism was a form of ancient obscurantism, a dated hatred we’d conquered. But then I saw it uncoil, like a snake in a temple, in a community I would have thought immune to it: among British progressives. I spent more time reading history - for How to be a Liberal and Origin Story - and realised how often others had made the same complacent assumption only to be proved utterly and categorically wrong. Anti-semitism is the great poison of the human mind. Once you accept that, your approach towards Israel becomes more nuanced, I think.

It’s a great question, sorry for the long response.

Anon

I have been struck, listening to the Origin Story episodes on Socialism, by how you occasionally sound transported when describing someone as handsome (in a spirit of gender equality I would probably use beautiful for men as much as for women). You often come across as grumpy and not someone easily transported by beauty so my question is this. What part does beauty play in your life and is politics always ugly (and if not where can the beauty be found)? Maybe that’s three questions. Also I’ve just seen Line of Beauty at the Almeida so maybe that is what has inspired my question (She outs herself as a North Londoner).

This is such a thoughtful question. First, I’m a little wary of how lop-sided those descriptions of beauty are. You’re right that I only ever really talk this way about blokes. I am actually much worse at describing male beauty than I am all the different types of female beauty, for the natural reason that I fancy women and not men.

The thing is, as a straight guy, you tend not to want to describe female beauty. It’s a shame. I saw a woman eating in a restaurant not so long ago - she was outside in the winter drinking wine and eating snails and smoking - it was all very French - and I could have written pages about the very specific sensuous, mucky way in which she was beautiful. But the truth is it can come across as creepy, or patronising, or reductive, or just straight up sexist. I mean shit - I wrote one piece this year on men and their relationship with women and I lost my social media for a week. So instead you end up describing female beauty in these rigid inoffensive terms - typically you use the word ‘striking’ - and then you channel all those thoughts into descriptions of male beauty.

I can’t properly go into the role of beauty in my life but I want to be clear that it is definitely there in politics. I find it beautiful when you hear stories from MPs about surreptitiously working together across party lines to achieve shared goals, without the whips knowing. In the moments when they offer each other emotional support when voting against their party, all these little acts of kindness and solidarity that are required to face the brute force of the Westminster system.

I find tremendous beauty in a well written report. Look at this National Audit Office report this week or the Sissons/Springford paper on the economy from last month, or anything by the public accounts committee. Sure they’re often dry. But they are plainly motivated by a sense of unspoken patriotism. Not the chest-beating kind. The kind that cares about the country and wants to make it a better place. They are the product of serious people trying to do serious things. They’re written by people who refuse to take a tribal or party political approach towards a problem, insist on finding out about it, then present their findings in a way that can be read by anyone. They’re the kind of thing a mature, thoughtful country produces, one which is confident enough to take an honest look at itself. I find them intensely beautiful, much better than a sonnet.

There you go, I’ve managed to go from sexy shit to National Audit Office reports in four paragraphs. You don’t get that on the Sam Freedman newsletter.

Anon

I was hoping to ask you about your experience (as you recall it) of stepping back from your period of Marxist affinity. You discussed this a little in the recent podcast and made it sound as though you had some kind of epiphany and then walked away. I wondered if there were actually some philosophical waypoints that you stopped at as part of your disembarkation from that mindset? Maybe a new passion or something more frivolous as a kind of cognitive amuse-bouche? I was very keen on the pro-Cuban support movement at around the same age and it took more effort than I imagined to transcend it.

Bart Crisp

You’ve spoken a bit about your political background and early flirtations with more radical left wing politics - what was it that led you to move away from that movement and towards liberalism? Was it driven more by personality or philosophy?

I attribute three things to saving me from Marxism. The first was anarchism. Anarchists would be on the same marches, in the same circles, they were easy to meet, they were much cooler, and they were trading in ideas about freedom, which then got me speaking a language which was compatible with liberalism. The lack of conversation between anarchism and liberalism is preposterous. The reason is primarily cultural - essentially respectability - but they have a lot to teach each other.

There was a much bigger impact from the ‘Knowledge or Certainty’ episode of the Ascent of Man, which is actually available in its entirety on iPlayer. It came on late one night and absolutely changed my life. Until then, I had been motivated by a desperate search for certainty. I got very depressed around the age of 13 - existential crisis, predictably - and ran towards Christianity. Then I shifted from Christianity to Marxism, which is an improvement but not a substantial one. And then I ran into Jacob Bronowski, who sorted my shit out.

His argument in that episode attacked the notion of certainty at its foundations. He shattered my sense of dogma and inflexibility, the pride I had in my stubbornness. He praised that which was humble, scientific, curious and gentle. In the final moments of that episode, he wades into the pond in Auschwitz and says: “This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.” It is the most powerful and important moment of television I have seen in my life.

The third solution was Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) , an extremely robust psychedelic. Ironically, one of the things that appealed to me about it was that it was short - with the effect lasting just 15 minutes or so. I realised that this was foolish very quickly. Before I had even finished breathing out the smoke, time had lost all meaning, had ceased to exist as a concept. Shortly afterwards my mind basically disassembled itself.

Most of all, DMT taught me humility. I was very aware of being a bipedal organism at the bottom of a gravity well, whose whole thinking apparatus evolved in the context of this environment, and who would therefore probably not have the basic computational capability to understand the truth about the universe, even if it was presented to him. Yeah, I know. Tim Leary semi-hippy bullshit. But it is a) true and b) utterly ruinous to Marxism or any kind of rigid ideological creed which demands obedience and conformity from its adherents. That drug did me the world of good.

People often talk about the dangers of drugs, which are real. They don’t talk enough about the dangers of not doing drugs, which are also real.

Ben

I understand you did some growing up in Southampton. I was on the isle of wight and we’d sometimes go over there to take drugs at The Nexus. Did you ever go? I came up for the first time dancing to Where’s Your Head At by Basement Jaxx. Good times.

Similar. My first time coming up was on a bus in central Southampton in autumn. It was shit obviously and then my mate thought he was having a heart attack. My second time was at the Paradox drum and bass event they used to put on at the Guildhall. That was better. I gurned so hard I basically consumed the inside of my mouth.

Simon

Is it worth getting Switch 2 if you already have a Switch?

No probably not. A MarioKart game and a Donkey Kong game alone aren’t reason enough on their own and you can’t justify it simply on the fact that it makes Zelda Tears of the Kingdom prettier. However, I would say this: Have you played Tear of the Kingdom and Cyberpunk 2077? If the answer is no, then you do really have to get a Switch 2. They’re two of the best games of the last five years. I am obsessed with both of them and the Switch 2 is a perfect way to play them. Either one of them will dominate your life for a good couple of years, so in terms of money spent per hour, it’s not even particularly expensive.

Adam Francis Smith

What is the worst film you’ve ever seen? No superhero bollocks. Proper films.

I’m honestly not sure. The only film I’ve ever walked out of was the Passion of the Christ. My Latin American aunties were sobbing all the way through. It clearly had a big impact on believers. But if you’re a non-believer it was just incredibly boring. Basically just a bloke getting twatted. I got exasperated very quickly.

Jane Hughes

Who do you think you are, and why do you share your thoughts?

A cunt, because I can’t stop myself.

I am going to make this the Question of the Week. It manages to sound rude, but actually works as a decent question. It also has the considerable advantage of brevity and self-confidence. So well done Jane Hughes, I will now give you a year’s free paid subscription to Striking 13. You can now access all the content which is reserved for paid subscribers, which is nothing, and enjoy your paid subscription benefits, which do not exist.

Odds and sods

As ever this newsletter is available as a podcast - just click play above, subscribe on Spotify, or find it on the Striking 13 homepage.

This is the third week of the Striking 13 sale, where you can become a paid subscriber for 50% off. For some insane reason, a few vestigial free subscribers have somehow resisted the temptation but they surely won’t be able to hold out long. Deals like this don’t last forever. Give the gift of Christmas you cheapskate cunt.

This week’s column for the i paper was on the NAO report on asylum I mentioned above. It’s a really important report, outlining the complete lack of a whole-system view from government and documenting how solutions introduced to fix one part of the system go on to create chaos in another part.

I’m particularly proud of this week’s episode of Origin Story, which tells the complete tale of Che Guevara, from bohemian Jack Kerouac drifter to doomed freedom fighter. It’s a quick, fast-paced adventure story, where we explore the importance of being a fitty, why idealists often become eager executioners, and how one man managed to combine literary magical realism with the dream of nuclear annihilation. It’s a good one. Subscribe on your podcast app or just watch it below.

This week I’ve been watching Platonic on Apple TV. It’s a comedy starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen as two old friends getting into trouble. Whenever it touches on the central conceit - that a man and a woman are friends - it’s hopelessly weird. Yes obviously they are, there is no reason this would be remotely controversial. But that is actually comparatively rare. It’s basically just two very fine comedy performers working from a beautifully written script. It is laugh-out-loud funny throughout.

I’m actually off after this - flying well away from this godforsaken island for a bit to see my family for Christmas. I’ll be deleting BlueSky and not really checking in on email - full disconnect for three weeks. In the meantime though, I have three or four pieces going up in the i newspaper while I’m away and there’ll be a newsletter in your inbox every Friday, including the newsletter event of the year - the Complete Dunt Awards 2025.

I suppose I should say something nice here so I will. This has been the worst political year I can remember, but being able to write this newsletter has been a delight. I am so touched by the support people show for it - financial and social - and by the wit and curiosity and decency of people who comment on it. Thank you. The last 12 months would have been immeasurably worse without you.

Now fuck off. Do not contact me under any circumstances.