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BM TALKS WITH RANA MITTER, JULY 2022
00:00.25
blondemoney
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of blonde money talks with me Helen Thomas the CEO and founder of blonde money. Today I'm joined by Professor Rana Mitter he is professor of the history and politics. Of modern China at the University Of Oxford and I'm sure you will have heard his dulcet tones many times on the television and radio because he is the expert on China at least as far as I'm concerned so welcome Rana.
00:34.81
Rana Mitter
Helen you're very kind probably far too kind but it's a huge privilege to be here on the blonde money podcast.
00:38.38
blondemoney
Okay, right, plenty to get through over the next half an hour or so so. The number one question on China I would like to ask you is relating to Zero Covid. Are they still managing that policy or how are they dealing with the virus now and what will they be doing looking ahead to the next twelve months
01:01.45
Rana Mitter
Zero Covid is the sort of code word we use for this idea that has been operating really over the last two years in China that any occasion when there is a single case of Covid in an area of a city means that the entire area will be locked down and possibly held in lockdown for days and weeks. That is still very much the official policy and Xi Jinping has been very clear that he regards the policy as one that he is personally associated with and which he thinks is really unanswerable in terms of its effects on China. So that has been something that has been operating for some time and I think probably will be operating for at least you know none a year or more. The reason for this is essentially that there is now a strong political imperative. Leading up to the party congress. Essentially the big event that takes place every five years in which the leadership mostly changes hands at that so that stage and this occasion everyone expects that actually Xi Jinping rather unusually, very unusually actually, will take on another term of office at the end of his 10 years - he'll go on for 15 - but other top leaders will change and because he wants to make sure that that succession is as smooth as possible. The Zero Covid policy which is very much his signature policy will stay with us.
That means that it will continue to have the effects that it's been having in urban China and actually beyond urban China for the last year or more which is a real problem particularly for small businesses. They find it very difficult to plan ahead to engage in the provision of retail. In particular the consumer sector if they don't know whether they’re about to have to suspend business, shut up shop maybe for weeks to come at zero notice. There's no doubt that the Zero Covid policy is now becoming extremely damaging in terms of the overall goal. Of getting China's domestic consumer economy to recover.
03:05.17
blondemoney
Yeah, and I mean that that leads me to my next question on the China growth target. Let's be fair about chinese statistics. They're not ah, always entirely an accurate reflection and perhaps you might want to talk about that. But there's always been a growth target for a number of years. You know they've they have revised it down a bit but do you think it is in any way credible that they will hit their growth target this year and what does that mean? Does that have an impact on that party congress you're talking about.
03:37.66
Rana Mitter
I think the economic growth target is almost certainly the single most important narrative element of chinese politics as it's happening at the moment. I mean Helen you and I are speaking at the end of July and people may be listening to this podcast a while later. So. Something I'm about to predict into the near future may have happened by this stage and if that's the case you can check up and find out if I'm right or wrong. But basically there should be a big meeting of the politburo coming up. You know in other words, China's top leadership within the Chinese Communist Party within the next few days of our having this conversation. And a lot of people think that the key issue. Maybe the only issue that's going to be at the heart of that meeting is whether to revise the annual growth targets for China and again, it's worth noting, I mean I think BlondeMoney listeners will have some expertise that maybe even the general public wouldn't necessarily have on this. But those growth numbers are absolutely central to the story that the Chinese Communist Party tells about itself. They say look we are not going to introduce western style democracy or liberal reforms any of these sorts of things but we are going to keep standards of living up. We are going to keep the economy growing. That's what we do and that's the bargain we offer the wider population. The problem is that for a variety of reasons one is covid of course but also beyond that there's other longer term changes. We might talk about some of those like demographic shift in China - all of those have meant that what are at least you know a spectacularly high growth rates that you saw back in the 1990 S and 2000 s simply weren't sustainable and they've come down to more reasonable levels. But this year they had a pretty ambitious post or, you know of late semi-post, pandemic. You might say target of about 5.5% overall growth, which still for an economy the size of China's is an absolutely huge amount, most people think that actually that is going to be very hard to hit and perhaps a number a little above 4% might be the level. That's more realistic now that actually is dealable with in terms of policy goals.
But I think the real fear is this what if it dips even lower supposing we're talking about growth rates. It's actually the UK would be overall quite happy with 2%, 3% well in the context of China that could be very problematic because a whole variety of issues that are emerging now to trouble policymakers. I'll just mention one that's growing - graduate youth unemployment. A big problem in China. Those are going to be much harder to solve if the growth rate goes down to something like None or 2% or lower 4% would be manageable. But the lower it goes the harder it is to recover.
06:17.30
blondemoney
Yeah, let's talk a bit on that policy challenge. You just mentioned about graduate unemployment. What are the policy levers they have open to them to address some of these challenges. What could the authorities do if growth does disappoint. What can they turn to sort out some of those challenges.
06:46.70
Rana Mitter
Well, there's a variety of things they can do Helen but as you know every single policy lever also has after effects that may create problems of their own. So let's take one that actually has been the lever that has been used over and over again since the financial crisis of 2008. At that point China pumped huge amounts of credit into the system which essentially was used to fund in many cases actually quite necessary projects such as domestic infrastructure airports railroads and so forth and China's high-speed railways for instance.
But China has probably absorbed pretty much all of the infrastructure that it can use by this stage. So there's a real danger that just pumping more money into the economy could in the short term create new opportunities including in terms of jobs and so forth but also might end up just fuelling further inflation. Now China unlike most western countries is not yet suffering from really serious inflation. Although it's sort of you know there in abeyance.
But I think that one of the things that the People's Bank of China will be absolutely desperate not to do is to inject the kind of credit into the economy that risks really dangerous inflation figures coming up later in the year. The problem is if they don't do something about it then that youth unemployment problem that I've mentioned, the lack of opportunities, which is being exacerbated by Zero Covid will continue to be a problem. I mean just to give an idea quickly Helen of how this is appearing in Chinese social culture popular culture, if you go on social media, you'll find quite often this little phrase which rhymes in Chinese – it means “Graduate then unemployed”. This is a sort of meme a hashtag that's going around in China so a lot of people are feeling the pinch on this.
08:36.85
blondemoney
Historically how pronounced is that issue with that particular cohort. I'm enjoying their meme of this situation, but is it unusual levels of unemployment for that particular group? Is there is there a demographic bulge as well?
09:05.88
Rana Mitter
So a lot of different problems have come together that mean the situation has some similarities to the historic past and some differences. So the similarities of this – probably the oldest generation in China, the people who are in their 60s, people who would remember from their younger days. A period of essentially artificially created but somewhat convincing full employment because in those days of course you had a command style economy, a soviet-style economy, and that essentially found full employment for everyone but most of that employment was either badly paid or not necessarily very productive.
And then of course the market reforms famously under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and 90s when China stayed communist in terms of its party but became quite capitalist in terms of its economics, created more genuine markets in employment and during much of the boom time that we've been talking about 90s, 00s, actually blue collar unemployment graduate unemployment were both pretty low overall, but there have been squeezes. So for instance, although unemployment wasn't very high in the late 1980s inflation did actually begin to take off at that time and students and people working on state linked salaries at that point began to become worried about you know a ”cost of living crisis” to use a current British phrase, which is one of the often forgotten reasons for the demonstrations that we came to know as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. Yes they were about democracy but actually there were also about inflation and its effect on people's wages. So turn back to the present day, I would say that right now, one of the things about China is of course it's very distinctive in some ways. It's an economy like any other. It is reflecting some of the pressures that we see in a slightly different form in Western Europe and the United States which is that there aren't enough people to do all the jobs.
It's just that not all of the skillsets and capabilities the people who are unemployed are able to match what needs to be done. Let me give you one particular example, relates to demographics, one of the fastest growing problems that China has right now which will become even more acute in the 2030s is that its overall population is aging fast, faster than anywhere else, because of the 1 child policy which ended about seven years ago but whose after effects of course will be felt for decades to come - has meant that there aren't enough people of young working age to sustain the workforce and what is particularly essential in a country that has a rapidly aging population and that is in the health and social care needed by elders. Now if you think about the United Kingdom a country that we both know well, we know that there's a huge problem with elder care in our own country too.
It's not because there aren't necessarily people who you could find if you really just found people who aren't in work at the moment to do the job but you need certain sorts of temperaments, training and willingness to accept particular conditions to do that and the problem is that many of the people, particularly rural blue collar unemployed in China, if they were basically pulled out of the countryside and made to work in these areas that actually have much more of an urban feel to them, then actually it's not entirely clear that that would work very effectively, any more than basically you know pulling people out of the urban areas and getting them to pick strawberries or potatoes in the fields in the UK has proved a particularly effective strategy. So that kind of mismatch is proving one of the issues in terms of the kind of rather toxic interaction between demographic change and unemployment in China.
12:34.50
blondemoney
Yeah I mean the labour skills mismatch, I think that is the key to cracking which economies have a better productive capacity than others.
We were already moving into this technological revolution which was rendering some people's skills unfortunately redundant. But then you get the pandemic and then you get a war and then initially a huge injection of liquidity which is now being taken away. I think that this labour market mismatches will persist for some time but actually for me the US is going to be the interesting one because it has the most flexible labour market. So you're already seeing that you know people just quitting their jobs in San Francisco moving to Montana, becoming tattoo artists, no longer being baristas - according to Instagram apparently. It's the new world in which we live. Talking of social media obviously Tiktok has been a Chinese success story. But I don't know if that is how it's viewed internally. We've seen various clampdowns on technology from the administration in China - what are they trying to achieve with that and are they going to carry on with it?
14:18.15
Rana Mitter
You're absolutely right Helen that one of the most contradictory seeming phenomena that's been visible above the surface you might say in Chinese politics and society in the last year or so is that one, if not 1 of the most innovative sectors in the Chinese economy which is tech, is the one that has been subjected to perhaps the most notable pushback and crackdown from the authorities and the question comes as to why that would be and I think that the answer is essentially that politics in China is for the moment becoming dominant over what the market would dictate in terms of economics. So let me explain for a moment what I mean by that. The first political problem is to do with the prominence of the tech sector itself and we could use the example that perhaps is best known I think many of your listeners will have noticed this about a year and a half ago. The public disappearance of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, which was about to do an IPO on Ant Financial. You know, big new enterprise and then he made a rather public speech in which he criticized China's financial regulators saying they were essentially overcautious and that's when the disappearing act happened. Although we don't have inside knowledge of exactly what was happening at that stage it's clear that he was being pretty publicly penalized by the communist party for daring to give the impression I suppose that he saw himself as being bigger than the party itself and that's 1 thing that the chinese communist party makes really clear - that no individual, with the possible exception of Xi Jinping perhaps, can be seen as being bigger than the party. So there's that very kind of direct political message. You tech guys may get feted at Davos and in Silicon Valley and around the world. But in China you still basically obey the framework that the party puts forward.
Beyond that there's a social reason for the crackdown. If you think about some of the most prominent aspects of the crackdown. So for instance, the video gaming sector where essentially a law was passed pretty much overnight saying that I think under sixteens are not allowed to do more than 3 hours video gaming a week. The online education sector, where people basically pay for online tutorials, were you know told actually it could still exist but only on a voluntary basis. You couldn't pay for it and actually the wider point there was to do with something which goes back to demographics.
Because one of the things the Chinese government is desperately keen to do is to get families to have more babies. You know other words they now think that the baby boom has now turned to baby bust and one of the greatest complaints that you get from family is women in particular on some Chinese social media, saying “It's all very well telling us to have more babies but where are they supposed to fit in these tiny flats that we have and where am I supposed to get the child care?” because of course many Chinese women of course go out to jobs which are both necessary to keep the household going and provide them with you know their own fulfilment. So in that context they want more assistance from the government and essentially the government was looking at areas where it's it thought that the tech sector was making family life more difficult. Number 1 was kids who are addicted to video games.
Ambitious parents particularly in the old one 1 child system, they put them in school and then when they come out to school they cram them for hours and hours to keep up with the with the joneses next door in terms of who can do more extra maths and more extra English. And by cutting through and saying actually nobody can have any extra tutoring online at all, the government was essentially in its own eyes trying to hold an olive branch out to parents saying look, we're not going to bankrupt you with all the extra tutorials - just have more kids. The fact that this of course did absolute havoc to the top prices of many of these companies were seen as a sort of collateral damage. Although I do notice that the most sort of tech friendly of the top politicians in China did a very prominent public event with major tech heads just a few months ago, I think as a means of the state showing that it didn't want to push back too far and they still did value the tech sector.
18:26.56
blondemoney
What is Xi Jinping's ideology if he has one and how does that compare to historical leaders of China?
18:52.92
Rana Mitter
I think he definitely has an ideology. He has a way of seeing questions that are important to him and therefore as he would say, not that I ever talked to him, but I was suspected to say by extension for China as well. The reason though that I think it's hard to identify as an ideology if you're only looking at it casually from the outside is that unlike certain types of ideology. Um, you know the ideology of democratic liberalism. The ideology of soviet communism the ideology actually even of Mao's China back in the 1960 s which is very much about international revolutionary brotherhood and sisterhood, Xi Jinping's ideology isn't really like that. It's really much more about looking inward on China itself and the idea that China and some of the phrases that he and his propaganda creators use, such as the great renaissance of China. The idea that China has been you know hiding its light under a bushel during the period of imperialist depression in the nineteenth and twentieth century and then its relative you know, low key nature in the international relations of the early twenty first century.
That that time is over and now it's time for China to come out in the world and really make a bit of a splash. But because that message you know is one that's in some ways quite late to alarm a lot of people in the wider world internationally China tends to throw out a much more bland sort of message you know ideas of phrases such as ”Communities of common destiny and prosperity” and these phrases don't necessarily mean very much but they're certainly designed to try and calm down a sense in the wider world that actually China is basically coming out to become a dominant sort of power. But within China I think if you had to identify what the elements of the ideology are of Xi Jinping’s thought, I would enumerate the following brief list of things. Number one is an absolute commitment to authoritarian government. They don't call it that they call it “whole process democracy” which is another way of saying authoritarian government. It does involve consultation with the wider population. It does not involve a liberal electoral choice of who your leader. Another element would be a commitment towards greater economic equality and actually many people sort of look that slightly cynically and say well look There are a lot of tremendously rich and corrupt Chinese leaders and you know that may well be the case, and I'm sure it is the case, but overall I would still say that actually the aspiration towards having a more even distribution of income in society is something that does seem to be both heavily felt and quite actively pushed within Chinese society as a whole linked to that. I'd say that there is an interest in a sort of revival and reverence for traditional Chinese culture in a way that was not true under Chairman Mao, who rejected a lot of that past associated with the philosopher Confucius and other great figures from China's past. But Xi Jinping and his immediate predecessors have very much embraced that idea of Chinese tradition and culture being heart of what should make a Chinese person proud to be Chinese but overall there's ideas of sort of confidence in cultural identity. Ah, a desire for economic equality overall and an absolute commitment to a highly top down authoritarian form of government all form elements of his ideological worldview.
22:22.54
blondemoney
That helps a lot, as I'm sure you know China often appears impenetrable to many outsiders and Xi Jinping more than most sometimes seems to do erratic things which I'm sure obviously do make sense domestically as you suggested.
22:43.91
Rana Mitter
I might just share a comment which I think was said to Henry Kissinger in the early 70s when he was visiting China and it was opening up and he was speaking to the prime minister and Kissinger said something on the lines of “to us westerners China is a very mysterious place” to which the PM just replied “Yeah, but to us Chinese it's not mysterious at all”.
23:37.10
blondemoney
Is China going to invade Taiwan?
23:40.49
Rana Mitter
I don't think it's a likely prospect in the immediate future. But I think there is no doubt that China and China's leaders are becoming much more clear in their desire to have Taiwan as part of you know the greater Chinese political system.
I think that what we need to be looking out for is a lot of things actually which will have a lot of implication for business as well as elsewhere which fall a long way short of the idea of a full-scale military invasion, a Ukraine type scenario, but do make life much more difficult for Taiwan. Cyber war, the possibility of using shipping to blockade the Taiwan straits. Ways in which trade partners are pressured. It's already beginning to happen in some ways more and more not to do business with Taiwan all of those could life very difficult for Taiwan without ever needing to actually get together an army of troops. Not least that actually that Taiwan's beaches are pretty hard to assault if you wanted to do D-Day in Taiwan you would have to actually choose both the right time of year and a rather particular part of the Taiwan Coastline to invade. It’s not as simple as simply kind of snapping your fingers and doing it in the morning.
26:12.72
blondemoney
And following on from that the actions of Russia in Ukraine and actually wider than that, the fact that effectively the West is now in economic war with Russia. Does that change the calculus for China?
26:56.87
Rana Mitter
I think the feelings Helen are ambivalent. You're absolutely right that China's leaders have been looking with great interest at what's been happening to Russia in terms of sanctions and their effects and they're also very very determined indeed that China will not get caught up in sanctions against Russia, which is why in certain areas they're being fairly open that they are willing to take advantage of what Europe isn't taking from Russia. Fossil fuels being an obvious example of that. We'll see how things go, but as we speak Helen the gas supplies are being turned off supposedly for maintenance reasons in Europe as well. So there may be an awful lot more gas to divert. Cereal crops are another example of where China might luck out in terms of cheap imports in areas where it does need supply.
In the wider sense of things though I think that China is not delighted by any means about the Russian invasion of Ukraine first of all, it creates turbulence in geopolitics in a year and an era where China wants things to be fairly calm so it can get things sorted out its way. I think that it is looking for opportunities to try and learn from the experience but also trying to sterilize itself from the effects as much as possible. So for instance, you talked about FX reserves, actually you know high level communist party cadres are being given orders that they've got significant overseas holdings, to liquidate them and bring them back inside China. You could either argue that's a way of trying to keep an eye or making sure that party members don't have too many dodgy foreign holdings. It could also to be an argument that this stuff is going to be sanctioned at some point the future if you're not careful.
I think the signals go both ways. China as you know has a very kind of basic version of SWIFT and while it hasn't had many takers, there is some sense that possibly the Ukraine crisis provides an opportunity for China to maybe push harder on providing an alternative that might in future years be a way of getting around the possibility that SWIFT is used essentially as a weapon to prevent transfers being made in and out of China just as it's now being used to prevent not all but many transactions in and out of Russia.
29:24.76
blondemoney
The Chinese central bank, it's been one of the first to look at dabbling in digital currency. Do they really want to embrace that? What is their opinion on cryptocurrencies.
29:42.47
Rana Mitter
I think that there's definitely an ambivalence again. Technically they'd be made illegal, I think lots of people's probably still hold them, essentially there was a clamp down on them largely because China is a country whose party state controls you know everything certainly including banking and finance and one of the reasons it's never opened up its capital market and become a genuinely internationally tradedable currency is that the amount of political control that they would lose over the currency is obviously huge. That's the price you pay in that to that case and I don't see them doing it.
If we go back to where we started with Zero-Covid, one of the effects has been a phenomenon that was really growing in a big way up to 2020 is the high spending Chinese tourist and business executive. You go down the streets of Oxford where I live or Stratford Upon Avon, you know large numbers of cities in Western Europe and North America and see large groups of Chinese tourists rather as there would have been Japanese tourists in the 1970 s with Japan was going through a demographic bulge. All of these full of high flying Chinese business executives doing deals. All of those people are basically stuck in China. If they were to be able to come out then they'd have to go through one to a couple of weeks of quarantine before they went back in and you'd have to be doing a pretty big deal. You know for some people to be fair, they're still doing that but you have to be doing a pretty big deal to make that worth it.
32:12.49
blondemoney
Yeah, and well we get into last few minutes of our discussion. Looking at world leaders. There's a lot a lot of change is happening in the West. Obviously it's a lot of work we do at BlondeMoney on this. What do you think if anything the Chinese think of Liz Truss or indeed Rishi Sunak?
32:35.13
Rana Mitter
Well I have to give you congratulations Helen, having read your emails and updates over some time now with your Boris-o-meter! I think that's now put out to rest unless he comes back in some form in which we were able to sort of track how precarious or not his position actually was and I think you got it pretty much nail on the head in the end.
I think so far the Chinese leadership appear to be still making assessments of the emergent shape of British politics. But I think that they will have noticed that Liz Truss's language on China is certainly very much tied to the idea of China as a security threat. She's clearly not someone who thinks that China is, in any sort of meaningful sense, a potential business partner and that might be different from where Sunak who as we speak looks less likely to win the premiership. Although you know there's a few weeks to go and who knows what might happen. Sunak himself of course has had to raise his game in terms of speaking harshly about China too, partly in response to Truss. So I think that from the spokespeople we've seen for the Chinese foreign ministry there is this stronger sense that actually the UK as a whole is going to be turning in a direction where the business opportunities of China such as they are and they are perhaps more limited than they might seem in some ways because the markets are often quite closed. Um are going to be downplayed and the security aspects are going to be played up.
I do think that one of the problems therefore, is that in the UK at the moment in both the public and private sphere, we continue to be very undersupplied when it comes to expertise in China and sometimes the government is not its own best friend recently due to foreign office budget cuts. The Great Britain China Centre which has spent the last few decades quietly but essentially helping business people in law and other areas navigate China and provide a Uk -based um, you know, politically unattached way of looking at these things has fallen victim and it does seem to me that this is not a time to be making budget cuts in terms of China expertise at a moment when top politicians are saying that they think that China is going to be whether it's a threat or whatever else. It might be one of the issues that will shape the next decade. We need to know more about the place not less.
34:48.53
blondemoney
Yes, there's going to be no denying whatever the relationship with China you can't ignore China. What about the US? Really what's the current opinion of China towards the Biden administration and if we did have Trump 2024 would they welcome his return or would there be concerns about trade wars etc?
35:26.37
Rana Mitter
I think that the current state of US politics overall rightly or wrongly Helen is giving China's leadership a sense that actually American leadership in the world is fuzzy at best.
They made a great deal perhaps too much but nonetheless they made a great deal of the fall of Kabul last year and that has been used certainly in Chinese News Discussions blogs social media as a way of suggesting that American power is not all it might be There are some wise voices. Having said that in Chinese academia and they have been you know trying to speak out firmly but gently to say that actually China's own elite would be unwise to count America out. In other words that just because America is having a bit of decline at the moment doesn't mean it's fundamentally down and out. You know the more sensible voices in China do say that but overall there's no doubt that they do consider that Afghanistan was a turning point in terms of the Biden administration's international ability to actually make the political weather and that something would need to sort of turn back to change that opinion.
In terms of a change of president in 2024. If it were Trump I think it's a hard one to call and even Chinese who I've talked to about this in private, they think about Trump go a bit both ways because on the one hand he was clearly harsher more willing to crack down in certain rhetorical ways in terms of China than any previous president. But I think they would also point out that some of the bark was often worse than the bite because things like the phase 1 trade agreement which Trump signed actually in the end didn't make that much difference in terms of US-China trade.
The abiding characteristic of the Trump administration was that even though it did have allies of the United States has always done it rode to the very edge it squeezed out what it could really get from those allies. The Japanese in Asia have been the closest allies of the United States ever since you know the end of the post-war settlement and yet the Japanese amongst others along with the Germans and others found it extremely difficult to deal with the Trump administration because it was never clear whether the alliance was based in a confluence of values or as President Trump himself at least stated on any occasion, it was a much more transactional sort of relationship and in the end the alliance of liberal countries western, Japanese, whatever it might be, has always been dependent on a confluence of values and it's not clear I think the Chinese would be trying to work out quite carefully whether or not those values really cohere if you get either the return of president Trump or a Trump-like, more isolationist president actually seeking to get getting into office.
38:11.23
blondemoney
Well thank you very much. We've pretty much come to the end I'm going to ask you one final question. I remember when I last met you, you introduced me to some great Chinese television and films. So is there anything our um listeners should be watching in terms of just great Chinese TV?
38:39.71
Rana Mitter
You can get on Youtube actually for free with English subtitles. Well I think we discussed a few over a drink the other day. I'll just mention one to get people started I think. Some of the issues we were talking about in the podcast you know demographics and the squeeze on youth unemployment and you know the changing position of women in the employment market and so forth can sound very abstract and of course we can illustrate them with some of the great you know charts and other graphs that you and BloneMoney put forward. But I think a TV drama is also quite a good way to look at those questions so I'm going to recommend “Nothing But 30”, which is one of the big hits. It's now about a year and a half old but it was an absolute sensation in China a couple of years ago. It's a tale of 3 women in Shanghai all in their 30s. One married but as it turns out not very happily and another one who you know basically has various disasters happening in terms of the way in which she relates to her husband too that it's very relatable in all sorts of ways. It sums up in many ways, the kind of juggling that young cosmopolitan chinese women in particular have to do between workplace, personal relationships and the changing and often very challenging economic circumstances of contemporary China. So if you want to work out what middle class Chinese think about when they wake up in the morning this is quite a good instant entry into that and of course you can you know, watch in bed with some peanuts or whatever as well. A nice relaxing way to do it I think.
40:12.97
blondemoney
Exactly well we very much applaud learning and entertainment all in one! That's very much a BlondeMoney view on things. Thank you this has been really useful, very interesting. It's the summertime and I do hope the living is easy as they say and that our listeners have indeed enjoyed a bit of entertainment and learnt a lot. Certainly I have.
40:45.92
Rana Mitter
Thanks! Very much indeed. Helen it's been absolute pleasure.