The confusion and disillusionment you feel watching Trump, Netanyahu, Farage, and a Labour government that has abandoned its own people is not a failure of your understanding. It is a completely rational response to a system that was never designed to work for you.

Neoliberal thinking dominates every major institution, and neoliberalism is, at its core, about preserving the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. The average person in the UK is not wealthy. That is why nothing feels like it is working for you. Because it isn't.

The people calling for division, entitlement, and the further enrichment of those who already have everything, they are the mad ones.

The ones who think a fairer world is possible, where children matter, where climate change matters, where equality and respect matter, they are the sane ones. That is you.

A politics of care is not a fantasy. It is what human beings actually are when the system stops punishing them for it. The path through this crisis will be painful, but we will come out of the other side, and it will matter enormously which ideas we carry with us when we do. That's why you need to cling on. We, the ones who aren't crazy, can do things better.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

I want to tell you: you are not crazy.

A man stopped me in the street the other day, a man I didn't know. I heard him yell out to me, "Richard". He called across the road, and not knowing who he was, but being curious, I waited for him to come over and talk to me. It turned out he's a local doctor. I have never seen him. I'm not in his practice, so I have no reason to have ever done so, but he wanted to tell me, thank you. "Thank you," he said, "for these videos, because I watch them every day and they make sense to me. In a crazy world where nothing makes sense, you seem to." And I was very grateful for that comment. We had a short exchange, a brief exchange of pleasantries. He didn't realise I lived in Ely. Now he did. He'd recognised my face, and as a consequence, we had this useful conversation.

But what I was able to assure him is what I just said: he isn't crazy for not understanding what is going on in this world. And I get this message time and again from people who do watch these videos and who do read my Funding the Future blog, which you should be doing if you're not already, because it provides a different perspective on all these issues.

They keep saying, I provide a voice that stands out in the wilderness. And I hope I am, because there is another way of looking at the world.

We face the challenge of looking at a world which is dominated by neoliberal thinking, and neoliberal thinking is all about preserving the interests of the wealthy. I am not about that. I am interested in you and that guy whom I met in the street, and all the other people I talk to on a regular basis and who send me comments.

I'm interested in the average person in the UK, the person who is not wealthy, because the average person in the UK is not.

I am interested in your well-being and how we can make the government and our economy work better for you.

You are not crazy to think that Donald Trump is mad.

You are not crazy to think that Benjamin Netanyahu is mad.

You are not crazy to think that the Labour government has failed you.

You are not crazy to think that the Conservatives have fallen off the edge of the cliff.

You are not crazy to think that Nigel Farage and Restore are absolutely horrible when it comes to politics and that they are promoting ideas that you find offensive.

That's not crazy. That's the truth, in my opinion.

But the fact is, we need to tell each other that we are not crazy. Right now, you need reassurance. You need the reassurance of people like me. You need the reassurance of commentators, and there are plenty of others, who say that the world we are living in is mad, and you need the reassurance of talking to others who might be of a similar mindset to you.

Try to find them. There must be some around, and you might also have members of your family who utterly disagree with you. Well, that's a problem. You can't change your relatives, but you do need to find that reassurance.

In a world that is going mad, and I promise you, it really is, we need to find that moment of sanity when we can sit, be quiet, and understand that there are others like us, and that we are the ones who are sane.

There is a better world that is possible.

There is a world that is fairer.

There is a world where our children matter.

There is a world where climate change matters.

There is a world where equality matters.

There is a world where respect matters because, at its core, a world where respect matters would not be running the economy in the way that we are for the benefit of the few at the cost to the many.

Please do understand that. At this moment, the thing that matters most of all is that you cling on to your sanity.

Your sanity is yours; you're entitled to it. Hold onto it because you are not the mad person at this moment. The rest of them, those who think that we should be moving to the far right, those who think that we should be dividing our society, those who think that the wealthy are entitled, they are the mad ones, and that is what is driving us to the precipice of an economic crisis at this moment. And we will come out of the other side, that I can promise you, it's always happened before, it will always happen again. But it's going to be painful, and holding onto our sanity during the course of this is absolutely essential.

So hold tight, cling on, talk, understand and ensure that you keep touching base with reality; the reality that we as human beings are caring individuals, and what we need is a politics of care that reflects that fact.

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