On the 14th July, a short video appeared on social media taken from UK’s Channel 4 News that in 1 minute and 45 seconds seems to neatly explain that last decade of British politics, and maybe the one to come.

On the first viewing it is a simple discussion of topics many of us have heard before, by people that seem an eccentric choice for a national news programme, not least on the day a new Prime Minister arrived in Downing Street. They all have “skin in the game” in one form or another, and their views are considered and seem a little fresher than what I had heard before. One of them is responsible a film I despise (“Kes”, pictured above), but we’ll forgive him for that.

For some reason this interview burrowed into my mind since I saw it last week. In quiet moments the words would be an ear worm, and I would ask myself “Why is this person saying that?”, “How did they get to believing that?”, etc.

On reflection, this short exchange of views gave me a glimpse of the tensions in modern Britain beneath its thin, unyielding and easily-scarred civility.

The video is availble on twitter but I provide a full transcript below.

The participants are: Jon Snow, the long-time presenter of Channel 4 News who is best known for his absurd sock and tie choices, who acts as moderator of this discussion; Fraser Nelson, Editor of The Spectator magazine, a position once held by now-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who now enjoys printing within his pages scathing critiques of Boris and finding other interesting ways to embarrass him; Ken Loach, film and TV director who has been politically active all his life, describing himself as a socialist and whose work focuses on Britain’s working classes including that bloody kid with that bloody kestrel; and, Kirstie Allsop, a TV presenter best known for a property-buying programme popular on Channel 4, but also lesser-known for her craft and “home making” programmes, but who every trivia bore in the country can tell you is Cath Kidston’s cousin.

Here’s the full text:

Fraser Nelson: Who were the free schools for? The least privileged. It was a progressive government before, a progressive government now.

Ken Loach: Yes, isn’t it extraordinary that the number of homeless families applying for bed and breakfast and temporary accommodation is 100 per cent increased? You’ve got 100,000 children called homeless. Food banks have appeared in the Osborne-Cameron era. There’s a desperate inequality. Desperate poverty. Homeless families. The inequality is marked in this city [London] you will see tower blocks of luxury apartments in which 80 per cent are dark, because they’re there for foreign investors who can’t even vote here, while you have homeless families cramped into one room. A massive increase in rough sleeping. The inequality, the poverty, the cruelty to vulnerable people marks these people.

Jon Snow: Kirstie?

Kirstie Allsop: It’s interesting what Ken said about the flats. We are not allowed to say that foreigners should not come and live here. The rich nor the poor. And I’m afraid the flats are what we have to put up with. We cannot say one type of person cannot be accepted into this country from abroad and another person can.

Ken Loach: They’re investments. They’re not to live in, they’re investments

Kirstie Allsop: No, they’re not investments. They’re the richest people in some of the most troubled countries in the World. They’re the rich people from Turkey, the rich people from Jordan, the rich people from Russia.

Jon Snow: Yeah, but why do we want their empty flats all over London?

Kirstie Allsop: We don’t want their empty flats and I don’t want their empty flats. But there can’t be one rule for the rich buying something to secure themselves, and another rule for those who are poorer.

Assume every participant sincerely believes every word they’re saying and ask yourself “why?” and “how?” and the reward is a small vein of understanding. I know it is difficult to believe people are sincere when having a political discussion in the media, but try.

There is a subtle sort of frustration we can all identify with beneath the surface of the words, and oddly for a political discussion, it seems rather easy to identify with nearly everything said at every stage.

I believe it is fair to say that Ken Loach’s views best typify those of the modern [social] liberal [economic] socialist. They certainly echo my own arguments when I talk about the chaos caused since 2008, priorities unsolved — likely exacerbated — by an indifferent coalition and then Tory government.

I expect Loach has at some point (and perhaps still does to this day), support Jeremy Corbyn in some capacity. In any scenario, his complaints echo those you will hear from many working class communities across the UK.

Loach does not attribute blame to the cause most point to, though. The outraged have often laid the blame fairly and squarely at working class immigrants or asylum seekers. Loach points in the other direction: it’s those who don’t work and who only invest, the capitalists in the true sense of the word, they are the cause of our ills, he suggests.

Those who have looked at the data and tried to glean some understanding, who have read the academic research, and who dug beneath the headlines, know he’s onto something.

The rise of free market liberalism, the encouragement of foreign investment no matter from where or from whom, and the ideological push to a smaller state has cost the below-average earner dearly, and has done so at the same time as a rise in immigration that has born the brunt of blame unfairly.

House prices have bubbled along everywhere in the last couple of decades, but particularly in London. This has not been caused primarily by a lack of housing caused by immigrants, but by a rising price rippled pushing out from high-value properties, a sector dominated by foreign investment capital.

A Westminster-led ideological push to close services to save money that did not in hindsight (and for some in foresight), need to be saved has resulted in strains on services. This has been felt by anybody needing a council house, a doctors appointment or a school place at any school rated by Ofsted any better than “on fire most of the time”.

The rich have gorged themselves a little, encouraged by tax rates only they can enjoy. The government brought about these attractive policies in the hopes that this capital investment would find itself inside businesses and ultimately supporting job creation: a trickle-down economy, in other words.

This has not worked, and the consequences have been socially devastating.

Some will insist, despite the evidence, that the fault remains with the people coming here for refuge or a regular job. They are not to blame, and never have been, and these arguments need to be rejected.

Loach’s protests are if anything too timid, the lie most of the UK have been sold, that they bought a little too willingly, is a disgrace.

Allsop for her part plays the part of the confused middle ground very well.

She herself is from an upper-middle class background and makes TV shows that come across as pleasantly aspirational for Britain’s middle classes.

Here, she is a perfect typecast for the typical home-owning middle-income swing-voter with a slight lean towards the Tories but perhaps one-time fan of Blair. Her words indicate a confusion which I find fascinating.

As somebody who personally has a financial stake in high-end property buyers flocking to the UK she of course wishes to defend them (what bookmakers call about an invested opinion “talking through their pocket”), but she is likely aware that immigration is unpopular and unpopularity kills TV careers, so she uses as a defence the thin argument that as a society we are “not allowed” to say immigrants can’t live here.

Her argument implies that she too has believed at some level the lie that immigration is a trouble-maker for us all, but in her experience, the people she has met, the people she perhaps does business with, well, they all seem quite nice. You know the type: sends the kids to private school, good taste in wine, nice clothes, got a Range Rover, only a few mentions in the Panama papers. They’re not trouble, are they?

And of course, the people she’s met are nice people, and on the whole representative of many human beings from other countries, and it should not come as much of a surprise that they are just like most human beings from this country, in that they’re perfectly fine and respectable people. That’s because humans are. On the whole, on average, humans are just fine. It’s just the odd arsehole that throws the average below “awesome”.

The confusion at the heart of all this seems to stem from that initial concern that immigrants at the bottom of the economic scale are a problem that must be dealt with, but those at the top of the economic scale need protection somehow. We want less of the poor ones and more of the rich ones, right?

The argument is probably backwards. The people at the bottom of the scale are growing the economy, the people at the top of the scale are causing price disruptions in the housing market for locals and it is they that are the problem. Kirstie’s friends are part of the problem, and Ken’s working classes — immigrants amongst them — are part of the solution.

This might sound like Marxist clap-trap to some. All I’d ask is you look at the data and ask who contributes more in tax, national insurance, GDP and economic activity: the working class immigrant, or the family who visits London once a year for a holiday, buys a few things in Chelsea and Knightsbridge whilst here, and who have helped house prices in central London rise to hundreds of multiples of the average London worker’s salary.

Of course, people investing in British jobs are not in the same boat, because they are economically active. The complaint that Ken Loach and I seem to share — and you should too — is that those who are economically passive, holding property and capital in the UK and contributing nothing else, are not adding value in nearly the same way as an average Eastern European labourer is.

Finally, the part that makes me the most concerned is the participant who said the least: Fraser Nelson.

It will be no suprise that Fraser is a Tory establishment fan. He supports the Tory party firmly and he offered praise to Nick Clegg during the coalition years. He is an economic libertarian and his views are in close harmony with those of both David Cameron and George Osborne.

And there he is at the top of the interview, painting their collective policies as progressive despite all the evidence they are the contrary for more than half the population.

It is a simple attempt at blinding people to the truth, and like many things that are simple in their workings, it seems to work rather efficiently.

I do not believe the Tories are inherently evil as many of my fellow travellers on the Left of British politics seem to. But, I do think they believe their own bullshit. And, as this interview has hinted, it’s the shared values, attitudes and policies of the Cameron-Osborne era that have harmed Britain, not the much-maligned immigrant.

I only hope that as a party they now seize the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and move more towards the centre-ground.