00:00What do we do about all of this, Cleo? Are we about to become ungovernable, do you think?
00:04It is totally possible that we are sleepwalking into a quite unprecedented situation.
00:09So that means in some places where we see a traditionally very, very low turnout in local elections,
00:17we're not really set up for a group of people who are so uncohesive with each other.
00:21And I don't think that is going to be good news for a kind of general local governance of people
00:27going forward.
00:28A lot of the governing that actually matters to people most of the time happens in local elections, right?
00:32But what about the candidates? Who are we going to end up with after all of this?
00:36Yes, well, I think as the Greens and Reforma found in particular, vetting people can be really difficult.
00:42When you're a growing party and you've suddenly got a massive amount of people who are interested in running
00:48and you're trying to field as many candidates as possible across the country, some bad apples do slip through the
00:55net.
00:55And we had this, you know, the Conservative Party have had this consistently too, the Labour Party have.
01:01And we had it in 2019, which was a snap election when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, end of 2019,
01:08if people remember, in December.
01:10And we suddenly had to field a load of candidates out of nowhere.
01:13We had to get all kinds of people who weren't already on our kind of lists, shall we say.
01:17And this is an established party with an effective machine who can actually vet people properly.
01:22And basically all kinds of wrong-uns came out of the woodwork.
01:26Tweets, you know, historic tweets we didn't know about, historic interviews people had given,
01:31things that people, you know, didn't really realise they'd ever be running for Parliament.
01:34So it wouldn't have mattered so much.
01:36And these kind of old Facebook posts are unearthed.
01:39So I can totally see how we might end up with all kinds of people getting elected,
01:46particularly from some of the, let's say, more fringe or independent movements.
01:49You know, we've got lots of independent people running who don't have any party machine at all.
01:53No one's vetting them except themselves, which is quite a bad sign.
01:57And, you know, it's perfectly possible we've got a load of Count Bin faces running different wards all over the
02:03country.
02:03I will not hear a word against that man, can I just say.
02:05He's hereditary as a Count, so he's gone, I imagine, Helen.
02:10RIP, Count Bin face.
02:12But, you know, we might have some really quite unsuitable people in quite important positions now
02:19who are running services that actually a lot of really very vulnerable people rely on.
02:25None of this is cheering me up, Gio, it's fair to say.
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