Dame Minouche Shafik

Dame Minouche Shafik0:00

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Speaker 10:03

Hello, I'm Jane Garvey, and before you settle down with this podcast, I want to tell you about another one that you might like. It's called Fortunately. Myself and Fee Glover, yes, well I don't encourage her too much, but she is on it, we share stories from behind the scenes of broadcasting with our very, very special and informative guests. We've had the likes of Tom Kerridge, Claire Balding and Nick Knowles. Fortunately with Fee and Jane. You can find it wherever you found this.

Speaker 10:30

Hello, I'm Christy.

Presenter0:31

Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book, and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:43

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter1:15

My castaway this week is the economist, Dame Manouche Shafique. She took up her position as Director of the London School of Economics last autumn, at a time when global growth forecasts were being upgraded and the world wide economy was basking in what those of her ilk refer to as a welcome cyclical upturn. However,

Presenter1:33

Given the extent of her experience, she likely took a rather sanguine view of those passing events. A one-time deputy governor of the Bank of England, and before that the youngest ever vice president of the World Bank, she has seen bubbles, bull markets and crashes come and go. She also knows, from bitter family experience, the impact a country's economic fortunes has on its citizens. In the mid-sixties, her once well-to-do family fled Egypt penniless after President Nasser's nationalisation programme. She says, most of human progress has come from the application of expertise to human problems. And I think the current dismissal of expertise is very troubling. Experts lost a lot of credibility after the financial crisis. People said, you told us this system was fine. And then it blows up. You'll be used to that, Dame Minister Shafiq.

Presenter2:23

Is it partly also to do with the fact that experts maybe up until then, and even now it's starting again, have oversold what they can tell us about the world and what they can predict?

Dame Minouche Shafik2:32

Would that be fair? It would be fair. Some experts pretended that they could predict the future, and probably expressed more certainty about their forecast than was merited.

Dame Minouche Shafik2:44

Having said that, I think it would be incredibly foolish to neglect.

Dame Minouche Shafik2:49

expertise in decision making. When you think about most of human progress over the centuries, we live longer, we're wealthier, we're healthier. And most of that comes from the application of expertise to human challenges. But I think experts have to do a couple of things differently.

Dame Minouche Shafik3:07

One is that they need to

Dame Minouche Shafik3:10

Recognize that there's a lot of uncertainty and be more humble.

Dame Minouche Shafik3:14

Two is they need to let the public know what lies behind their expertise. There are many people now who express opinions, but without much behind them.

Dame Minouche Shafik3:23

And I think particularly experts and particularly those working in universities and in the academy.

Dame Minouche Shafik3:28

Need to share with the public the fact that the work that they do is backed by the rigours of peer review, that they have to publish their data, that they have to declare conflicts of interest, and they have to subject themselves to rigors that random people expressing views on social media don't have to subject themselves to. And I think if people know that,

Dame Minouche Shafik3:52

They will be much better equipped to decide which experts to listen to and which not to.

Presenter3:57

Do you think it's the the communication of the issue that's been the problem?

Dame Minouche Shafik4:00

When I was at the Bank of England, we did a bit of research on Dr. Seuss and looked at how clearly he wrote and how that was so powerful at getting children to want to read. And we compared that to our own reports. And the average Bank of England report required a reading age of 13 years of education, which meant that the vast majority of the British public couldn't understand what we were talking about.

Dame Minouche Shafik4:23

And so we made a real effort to try and simplify our language and be clear. And I don't mean dumb it down at all, because I think people who really know what they're talking about can explain things in very clear and simple language.

Presenter4:35

Well, we look forward to that today.

Presenter4:37

Many Shafiq, tell me about your first piece of music. What are we going to hear and why is it on your list?

Dame Minouche Shafik4:41

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik4:42

The Colm Concert by Keith Jarrett. And the reason I love that piece is it's a good reminder that sometimes when things go terribly wrong, you can do your best work and when you're really challenged. So the story of this piece of music was that he was invited to give a concert in Cologne. It was due to start very late at night, 11.30 at night. It was organized by a 17-year-old.

Dame Minouche Shafik5:05

Who ordered the wrong piano?

Dame Minouche Shafik5:07

and when he arrived late at night, exhausted,

Dame Minouche Shafik5:11

The piano was broken. Some of the keys didn't work, the pedals didn't work. He refused to play and then in the end was persuaded and ended up playing and improvising the most beautiful piece of music which ended up becoming the best selling solo jazz album in history.

Dame Minouche Shafik5:25

And it's just a great reminder of how when things go wrong

Dame Minouche Shafik5:29

you can actually sometimes rise to the occasion.

Presenter6:29

That was Keith Jarrett with the opening of the Cologne concert. De Manuschafik, the London School of Economics and Political Science, I believe to give it his full title, has a proud tradition of being right at the centre of debates regarding the role of the state in society. William Beveridge, who held the same position as you do, laid down the foundations of the welfare state, of course, in the early 40s.

Presenter6:52

Might I ask you just to play a little parlor game with me, if you were to put yourself in his shoes, what do you think he would make of the welfare state and the position it's in currently in the UK?

Dame Minouche Shafik7:02

I launched a project at the LSE this month to rethink the welfare state in light of Beveridge. It's the seventy fifth anniversary this year, and I think Beveridge would be amazed at how much the welfare state had grown.

Dame Minouche Shafik7:17

I think there are many elements to it that he never envisioned. You know, I think he thought of the NHS, for example, as a sort of.

Dame Minouche Shafik7:25

in case of emergency as opposed to a preventative health care and comprehensive health care system. I think he'd be amazed at how the role of women has changed and how the welfare state has changed to support women. I think he would be

Dame Minouche Shafik7:39

Amazed at the size of the welfare state. I think he'd look at an aging society and the demographics.

Dame Minouche Shafik7:45

And I think he would say it's time for a reform and to rethink how do we have a welfare state that is both affordable but also meets a very different set of needs in a modern economy.

Presenter7:56

You spent, I mean, a good healthy chunk of your career as a very senior civil servant. You were permanent secretary at the Department of International Development.

Presenter8:03

I wonder how this is a sort of current debate, how individuals guard against their sort of personal preoccupations, maybe even their personal views and opinions, starting to seep into what they choose to expose the minister to, because ministers have to rely very heavily on experts in their department, because they come in and they've got to get across a brief very quickly.

Dame Minouche Shafik8:24

Policy always consider an array of options when they're looking at policies. There is never just one answer. There are usually many ways you can solve a problem, and they each have costs and benefits.

Presenter8:35

Was there ever a time when you sat across having done that meticulously and thought I can't believe he chose that one?

Presenter8:42

You're kidding me on, did you? Come on, seriously, yes.

Dame Minouche Shafik8:44

Absolutely, yes.

Presenter8:46

And

Dame Minouche Shafik8:46

But you know what? They're democratically elected and I'm not, so that's their prerogative. Bad policies tend to get undone eventually. So

Dame Minouche Shafik8:55

That's the democratic process.

Presenter8:57

Uh Minish Shuki, tell me about your second piece of music. What are we going to hear?

Dame Minouche Shafik9:00

My next song is called Anamasri. The lyrics which I'll translate a bit start with

Dame Minouche Shafik9:05

I'm an Egyptian, whether I'm a Muslim or a Christian or a Southerner or from Sinai or whether I'm rich or whether I'm poor.

Dame Minouche Shafik9:15

And it really speaks to me because of my own family experience. I come from a family that's Muslim.

Dame Minouche Shafik9:23

My grandmother, who was the fifteenth of 17 children, didn't go to school herself, but was incredibly liberal and open-minded. And she sent her children to French Catholic schools and encouraged them to learn about other religions. And there was just a level of tolerance that was very high. And similarly, when I was a teenager in Alexandria, I sort of got the tail end of the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell, which and so my friends were a hodgepodge of Armenian and Greek and Lebanese and French and Italian and

Dame Minouche Shafik9:56

That open and tolerant.

Dame Minouche Shafik9:59

World was one in which I grew up and which I value and which this song reminds me of.

Speaker 310:11

I know once it is.

Speaker 310:17

Anna Hansri

Speaker 310:28

I know what's in.

Presenter10:42

That was Ihab Abdou and Anna Musri. Deymanoush Shafiq, you were born then in Egypt in nineteen sixty two, as you say, born in Alexandria. You were there till you were around about four. It was a well-to-do family.

Presenter10:55

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik10:55

My mother and my father's family had land and had farms and my father had done a PhD in in the US and he was a scientist and a professor at the university and quite sort of enterprising. My grandfather had a big industry. He was also a PhD at from Imperial College and

Dame Minouche Shafik11:14

They had a big chemical company as well as so shares in various companies and things like that. So this would have been a very comfortable life? Yes, it was. And you know, we lived in Alexandria. My mother's family was in Cairo. We had the land in the countryside between the

Presenter11:28

The nationalization of Egypt by President Nassar began to take place.

Presenter11:32

And overnight the money went.

Dame Minouche Shafik11:34

Yeah.

Presenter11:34

Yeah. It was

Dame Minouche Shafik11:34

It was more gradual than that. It wasn't quite overnight, but the sort of the nationalizations proceeded in a kind of rolling fashion. And so my father in particular was very hard hit and lost his land, lost his house, lost

Dame Minouche Shafik11:49

They lost the company that that my grandfather had set up and they lost quite a lot in the space of a couple of years. He never quite recovered from ECK because he was you know he was already in his late thirties by that point and it's the sort of stage in life when you should be on a firmer footing.

Presenter12:05

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik12:05

And to have to start from scratch again at that point was quite hard.

Presenter12:08

You said that your father had studied, had done his PhD in America. Was that why he chose to take his family to America?

Dame Minouche Shafik12:14

Yes, in fact his old supervisor, PhD supervisor, helped him find a job. He worked for what was then the Food and Drug Administration and later became the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. as a research scientist.

Presenter12:25

So what were the circumstances then, the v I imagine the very reduced domestic circumstances? Where did what was your house like? Where did you live?

Dame Minouche Shafik12:32

We lived in a small house in Savannah, Georgia. Took my kids there recently just to show them. It's quite modest and uh my mother pitched up speaking nothing but French and Arabic.

Dame Minouche Shafik12:44

And we didn't speak English either. And it was not a very.

Dame Minouche Shafik12:49

Cosmopolitan neighborhood, I'd say. So it was a big change. And how was your mother?

Dame Minouche Shafik12:54

It was very hard for her. She was a very young mother. She had me at nineteen and we we moved to the US and she was twenty two. Goodness me. She'd never left Egypt other than for her honeymoon. She would go to the mailbox every day and cry until she got letters from her family.

Presenter13:11

Let's have some more music, Denman Shafiq. Tell me about this. We're going to hear your third track. Why have you chosen this?

Dame Minouche Shafik13:15

So, my third track is by Three Dog Knight, and it's called Black and White. I had a very fragmented educational experience. I went to, I think, nine schools, but I'm not quite sure, could have been ten. And partly it was because we moved, but mainly it was because it was the era of desegregation in the US. And so, you know, from year to year, they would bus you to a different school as they were trying to get a racial mix. And we were in the South, and it was tense. One of the things I remember most is that in American schools, you would usually say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem every morning.

Dame Minouche Shafik13:49

But the schools I went to, because they were trying to encourage racial integration, we sang this song, Black and White, every morning to start the school day. And so it's a very strong memory for me.

Speaker 314:06

The ink is black, the page is white. Together we learn to read and write. A child is black, a child is white. The whole world looks upon us.

Speaker 314:24

A beautiful side And now a child

Presenter14:33

Black and White, sung by Three Dog Knight. Damn, Shufik, do you still know all the words to that?

Speaker 314:37

Uh

Dame Minouche Shafik14:37

Yeah.

Presenter14:37

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik14:37

Uh

Dame Minouche Shafik14:38

I sing it every day.

Presenter14:40

For understandable reasons, your father then was very, very keen on education. He thought they can take away everything, but they can't take away your brain.

Dame Minouche Shafik14:48

That's what he used to say to us when we were growing up. I think it was his salvation, you know, having lost everything, had he not.

Dame Minouche Shafik14:56

had a education, he could not have

Dame Minouche Shafik14:59

Looked after his family. So he instilled that in us from a very young age. How was he with the

Presenter15:05

Report cards.

Dame Minouche Shafik15:05

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik15:06

Ugh.

Dame Minouche Shafik15:08

Demanding.

Dame Minouche Shafik15:09

Take me through that. So, you know, I remember once coming home with straight A's, and he just said, Is that the best you can do?

Dame Minouche Shafik15:16

I mean it was partly tongue-in-cheek, but not completely. Not completely.

Presenter15:19

Yeah.

Presenter15:21

Well how did you marshal your intellectual prowess?

Dame Minouche Shafik15:24

It was the era of educational experimentation, so I went to some very

Dame Minouche Shafik15:30

Strange schools. I went to one school where we had 100 children in the classroom with movable walls. It was also a time when they were experimenting a lot with children doing independent learning. So for me, that suited me. So you could kind of go at the pace that you wanted to go. And I was a keen reader, but I didn't grow up in a house with a lot of books. You didn't? I didn't. I didn't. My dad was a scientist, and he sort of, I didn't ever see him read a novel until his 70s. But I remember at the time you could only take two books out at a time. So I had like three library memberships, and my mother at the weekend would drive me round, and I would get books from all the local libraries.

Presenter15:49

You didn't? I didn't. That's surprising.

Presenter16:05

Um you were sixteen before

Dame Minouche Shafik16:06

We were well we went back

Presenter16:06

We worked.

Dame Minouche Shafik16:08

Once when I was a teenager and then moved back when I was fifteen to go permanently to go back.

Presenter16:14

Minishlets have your fourth. Tell me about this then. What are we gonna hear?

Dame Minouche Shafik16:16

So the next song is from Fleetwood Mac, which was Fleetwood Mac's album Rumours was the sort of soundtrack to my teenage years, like I guess a lot of people of my generation. It was the most popular song played when I was in secondary school and this particular song, Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, is one of my favourites.

Speaker 316:36

Stop thinking about tomorrow. Don't stop.

Speaker 316:41

It'll survive you.

Speaker 316:47

Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.

Speaker 316:59

Why not think about times to cover?

Speaker 317:04

About the things that you've done

Presenter17:07

That was Fleetwood Mag and Don't Stop. So, Dame and Usha Fique, you went to do an economics degree in the US and then you did a PhD at Oxford. That's right, isn't it?

Speaker 117:14

Uh

Dame Minouche Shafik17:14

Yeah.

Presenter17:15

How old were you by the time you thought it's economics for me?

Dame Minouche Shafik17:20

Well, it wasn't until I got to the LSE that I kind of made that choice. I was always interested in politics and economics and the interconnections between them. I sort of loved the rigour of economics, and I think when I went to the LSE to do my Masters, that was when I thought this is the entry point to understanding things better for me.

Presenter17:26

Right.

Speaker 117:27

Uh

Presenter17:40

And can we draw a reasonably straight line between the experience of your family and the fact that you knew it was relevant, that this stuff mattered?

Dame Minouche Shafik17:49

Hmm.

Presenter17:49

Would that be fair or is that far too literal?

Dame Minouche Shafik17:51

No, it's n it would be fair because, you know, so much of my work thereafter was around the relationship between the state and the economy. And in Egypt they had that period of nationalizations, which was very well intentioned, but failed.

Dame Minouche Shafik18:07

And I think trying to figure out what is the role of the state in

Dame Minouche Shafik18:11

promoting economic development in creating opportunity for its people is really one of the biggest questions in economics and is one that has kind of dominated my career.

Presenter18:21

I want to ask you for a moment about a very interesting well, actually all of your career is interesting, but particularly I'm interested in this period around about 2008 to 2011. You were Permanent Secretary for the Department for International Development. As people will be aware, David Cameron committed to this 0.7% spend of gross national income on foreign aid. I mean, it was at the time a hugely contentious commitment. There are people on both sides of the argument that feel very passionately about it.

Presenter18:49

You've seen it from the inside. This is a time when we are trying to manage austerity here in the UK and a lot of services are being cut to the bone.

Presenter18:58

Do you think it's time to reassess the commitment?

Dame Minouche Shafik19:00

Actually, I think the commitment is something we should be proud of. I have personally seen

Dame Minouche Shafik19:05

The huge benefits that come from the aid program. Children who've gone to school who could have never had the opportunity, mothers who are able to manage the number of children they have, people who've been able to set up small businesses with tiny, tiny loans. It's amazing how very small resources can deliver huge impact.

Dame Minouche Shafik19:24

I also think that there is a case for enlightened self-interest, that if people in other countries have good prospects, they will stay in their own communities, they will build economies that will thrive and that we can trade with and there will be benefits.

Presenter19:40

True.

Dame Minouche Shafik19:40

Uh

Presenter19:40

That's a kind of soft diplomacy thing as well. So it's good for us. It's good for them and it's good for us.

Dame Minouche Shafik19:41

Well

Dame Minouche Shafik19:43

Good for us. And I think there is a moral issue where I think

Dame Minouche Shafik19:47

Some of us are lucky to be born in certain countries, in certain in families, and

Dame Minouche Shafik19:53

I myself, when I was small and would go and visit my mother's family's village in Egypt, I would see little girls, they looked just like me, and I looked at them and I could have been them. And I could have grown up in a village without ever going to school, being forced to marry someone, not ever earning my own income.

Dame Minouche Shafik20:10

And I think for all of us we need to recognize that there is a huge element of our lives which is good fortune. And if we have had good fortune in life in terms of where we're born and how our life has turned out, we have a duty to share the benefits of that good fortune with others. Talent is spread evenly around the world, but opportunities are not. And some of us have had opportunities in our lives. And I think there's a moral dimension of being able to spread those opportunities to others.

Presenter20:39

Let's have some more music. No Shafiq, we're gonna listen to your fifth disc.

Dame Minouche Shafik20:43

When I was a student at the LSE, I bought a little Walkman on Tottenham Court Road and I listened to music on that and I had two cassettes. One was a Motown one, which was incredibly scratchy, and the other one was this one, which is Beethoven's Ode to Joy. And whenever I got really stuck when I was trying to write my thesis, I would listen to this, and it would motivate me to carry on.

Presenter22:05

That was part of the fourth movement from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, performed there by the London Symphony Orchestra with Jennifer Vivian, Shirley Vares, Rudolph Petrak, Donald Campbell, and the B B C chorus conducted by Joseph Cripps.

Presenter22:18

So, Deymanus Shafikin, in 2014 then, you were appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and you s you sat on the it's always so serious sounding this thing.

Speaker 122:23

And you said

Presenter22:27

At the Monetary Policy Committee, and of course it sets infamously, it sets at interest rates. Can you explain?

Presenter22:33

In the simplest of terms, for somebody like me, why do these incremental, tiny shifts in interest rates matter so very much to the rest of us?

Presenter22:43

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik22:43

The tiny shifts don't matter a huge amount. And admittedly, the press and the financial markets obsess enormously about very small movements in interest rates. But for most people, the most important things that

Dame Minouche Shafik22:57

The Bank of England does is keep inflation low and steady.

Dame Minouche Shafik23:01

Very high inflation tends to hit poor people the hardest. And we can think back in history at times when inflation was incredibly high and interest rates were very high and people couldn't afford to pay their mortgages and negative equity and all of those things. So the most important thing is that inflation is under control and that's what most people should worry about. And if that is the case, it's great that they don't even think about what the Bank of England is doing and takes that for granted. The other important thing is making sure the financial system is stable. And I think the crash in 2008 showed all of us what can go wrong when the financial system collapses and the huge cost to the economy that that imposed.

Dame Minouche Shafik23:44

And so much of the consequences in terms of the cuts in public spending, the need for austerity, was because of the costs of the bailouts. And that is something that is important to all of us.

Presenter23:55

Now of course, I know that you were not at the London School of Economics when Her Majesty the Queen visited not long after the two thousand eight collapse, but she famously asked the question to all these big brained economists, why didn't you see it coming? When it comes to subprime mortgages and credit default swaps,

Presenter24:14

Pre-the crash, did you know that stuff was happening and had you?

Presenter24:18

Maybe not predicted it, but thought this is all going to hell in a hand cart, this stuff.

Dame Minouche Shafik24:22

Well, prediction is a very difficult business, especially in economics, because people don't behave like chemicals or physical objects. So, unlike

Presenter24:24

See ya.

Dame Minouche Shafik24:32

scientists who can repeat an experiment over and over again and say, aha, this is the relationship. In economics, the economy is far too complex and evolving all the time. You know, the problem with the two thousand eight financial crisis wasn't so much that

Dame Minouche Shafik24:47

People fail to predict it because predicting turning points in the economy is a mugs game, isn't it? It's a mugs game.

Presenter24:54

It's a mine.

Dame Minouche Shafik24:56

We failed to understand the vulnerabilities in the system at the time. Economists thought it was referred to as the great moderation.

Dame Minouche Shafik25:03

There was a view that as long as individual financial institutions were stable, the system would be stable.

Dame Minouche Shafik25:09

and people underappreciated the vulnerabilities. There were a few who were very insightful and identified some of these vulnerabilities, but unfortunately they weren't listened to enough.

Presenter25:20

Let's have some more music, Amanus Shafiq. At time for your sick.

Dame Minouche Shafik25:24

Joni Mitchell's All I Want. And I think that music is from a period in my life when I think like a lot of people in your sort of twenties and thirties and you're sort of

Dame Minouche Shafik25:33

looking for love and trying to figure out that part of your life.

Dame Minouche Shafik25:36

I have a playlist which my husband jokingly calls Suffering Women, which consists of Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Edith Piaff, Adele, that sort of genre of music. But Joni Mitchell was the first music and eventually I did meet my husband and figured it out, but it took a while.

Speaker 325:56

I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, traveling, traveling, traveling Looking for something, what can it be?

Dame Minouche Shafik26:00

Go!

Speaker 126:00

Traveling, traveling, traveling.

Speaker 326:06

Oh, I hate you some, I hate you so I love you so I love you when I forget about

Speaker 326:18

I wanna be strong, I wanna live alone, I wanna belong to the living of life, I wanna get up

Presenter26:28

That was all I want, Jenny Mitchell, from what your husband Damonus Shafiq calls your suffering woman playlist. Speaking of which.

Speaker 326:33

Yeah.

Presenter26:36

You're a mother of twins. You're a stepmother to three other kids.

Speaker 326:37

Soon you

Presenter26:40

That all happened in a year.

Speaker 326:42

Yeah.

Presenter26:43

What a year it must have been

Dame Minouche Shafik26:44

He was

Presenter26:45

You went from zero to five in one year.

Dame Minouche Shafik26:48

But I was so ready for it, actually. I was so happy to have all those children in my life. It wasn't until I was 40, so I was an old mum. But I had really wanted kids, and so to have so many in one go was great. It was exhausting. I mean, I can barely remember it, but it was happy.

Presenter27:04

To be pregnant with twins at any age is a huge challenge for most women. To be pregnant.

Dame Minouche Shafik27:09

Mm.

Presenter27:10

With twins when you are 40, which is an older mother, just technically it is, and to be in a very demanding job. How do you calibrate that?

Dame Minouche Shafik27:18

You know, I consciously decided to stay in the same job and not move. I needed a job that I could do in my sleep since that might occasionally happen. I was a vice president at the World Bank for infrastructure.

Presenter27:26

What were you doing?

Presenter27:29

Well yeah, easy private lemon squeezy that one.

Presenter27:33

I hope they're not listening.

Presenter27:37

I understand what you mean though. You understood the structure, they knew you, you knew what was required.

Dame Minouche Shafik27:37

Pandas

Dame Minouche Shafik27:40

good team in place, I could rely on them. You know, I often say that there's sort of a holy trinity for working mothers is to have a a good partner, a good boss and good childcare. And if you have all three of those, you can sort of make it work. If any one of them is not working,

Presenter27:58

It's a problem

Dame Minouche Shafik27:58

Yeah.

Presenter27:58

Yeah. Um you do not have much truck with the expression the glass ceiling. Instead, you prefer the sticky door. Explain that to me.

Dame Minouche Shafik28:05

The problem with that metaphor is it it implies you're sort of banging your head against something and then eventually it shatters and all these other women can flood through.

Dame Minouche Shafik28:13

And it doesn't really work that way. And I like the sticky door a bit more because it helps if there's somebody else pulling on the other side, what I just refer to, good bosses who are willing to take a risk on you, give you an opportunity that might be a bit of a stretch and then support you.

Dame Minouche Shafik28:29

And often even if you get through the door, the door shuts again and it sticks again and it takes another person to nudge it and someone else to pull it open for them before it stays open for everyone.

Presenter28:40

Let's have your next piece of music. Tell me what we're gonna hear then. It's uh it's your seven.

Dame Minouche Shafik28:43

Queens Don't Stop Me Now, and I always remember an event at my children's school and they were performing that, and you had this thirty, ten year olds just full of life, screaming this song. And it reminds me particularly of my daughter, who's just bursting with life. And

Dame Minouche Shafik29:01

It's also a good reminder of how nice it is to be around young people and it's one of the reasons I love being at a university because there's just all that potential and energy.

Dame Minouche Shafik29:10

an optimism which is contagious.

Speaker 329:14

I'm having a good time!

Dame Minouche Shafik29:16

Uh

Speaker 329:16

Shooting slide leaping through the sky like a tiger Defying the laws of gravity I'm a racing car Passing by like Lady Goddiver I'm gonna go, go, go There's no stopping me I'm flying through the sky 200 degrees, you're smiling Call me Mr. Fire and Height I'm traveling at the speed of light

Presenter29:46

That was Queen Anne Don't Stop Me Now, and you said Manush Shafiq, partly to remind you of people in your children's school, these little kids, singing it and full of gusto, but also because you you enjoy as heading up the LSA being surrounded by young people. And I want to ask you a little bit about the temperature.

Speaker 129:58

Mm-hmm.

Presenter30:02

On university campuses and common rooms these days, you know, we hear so much about no platforming, which is when speakers are not allowed to come and present their ideas, however controversial and contentious they might be, or safe spaces where students know that they can go and they won't be upset by what they're about to hear. To many people, that seems an absolute challenge to the idea.

Speaker 130:07

We we should

Presenter30:25

Of free speech and thought and stimulation and being told that your point of view is valid, but it's certainly not the only one. What would you make of all of that?

Dame Minouche Shafik30:34

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik30:34

Uh

Presenter30:34

I think universal

Dame Minouche Shafik30:35

Justice must be a place where debate happens and where different points of view are presented.

Presenter30:37

Where?

Dame Minouche Shafik30:42

The LSE has a really long tradition of having people with diametrically opposed views, you know, from Marxists to right-wing economists to the person who founded UKIP to a very strong European institute that works on European issues.

Dame Minouche Shafik30:59

The key thing is that the debate has to be based on evidence and rigor and respect.

Dame Minouche Shafik31:05

That is how human knowledge advances. You know, one of the great philosophers who taught at the LSE, Karl Popper, always talked about, you know, the fact that you needed the clash of ideas in order to make intellectual progress, and you needed an open society in order to have that happen. And I think one has to resist these pressures because if we do, we aren't giving the students we have a proper education. What we need to teach them is how to marshal facts and evidence and make arguments and take knowledge forward. So you are in itself against no platforming?

Presenter31:41

You think it's a bad idea?

Dame Minouche Shafik31:42

Yeah.

Presenter31:42

Yeah.

Dame Minouche Shafik31:42

I do.

Presenter31:42

I don't

Dame Minouche Shafik31:43

Yeah.

Presenter31:43

I think we're in the business of banning people. Let's listen to your final disc. We're going to have your eighth now, Damanus Shafiq. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear?

Dame Minouche Shafik31:44

Uh

Dame Minouche Shafik31:50

So this one is the first prelude and fugue that my son learned to play, and I think I must have heard it a thousand times, so it has to be one of my favourites.

Presenter33:00

The Prelude number three in C Sharp Major from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, played there, not by your son, but by that was Glen Gould. So, Manouche, I'm going to send you away with three books. You get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and then a book of your own choosing. What's yours going to be?

Speaker 333:06

Oh yeah, that was a problem.

Dame Minouche Shafik33:07

Then

Dame Minouche Shafik33:16

This was an impossible question for me. I really struggled.

Dame Minouche Shafik33:21

'Cause choosing your favorite book is like saying, Well, who's your favorite child? I mean, they're just I agonized. I tried the idea of a flash drive with the British Library, the LSE Library on it, and you rejected that. That's not gonna pass.

Speaker 133:30

That's not

Dame Minouche Shafik33:32

So I have a new idea, which is a survival guide.

Dame Minouche Shafik33:37

Because I'm not very practical and I I won't know which berries I can eat and that kind of thing. And most importantly, when I'm kind of have done with reflection and enjoying the beauties of this island and I'm ready to go home, I can build a boat and get back to reading lots more books.

Presenter33:53

Okay, I'll pretend I didn't hear that, because you're really not allowed to build a boat. You're not allowed to build a boat, rather.

Dame Minouche Shafik33:56

And not to build

Presenter33:59

Your luxury. What will yours be?

Dame Minouche Shafik34:00

That one was easier. I have these albums which I keep for my children, in which I keep kind of a history of their lives. Everything from photographs to school reports to boarding passes from holidays to funny things they have said over the years. It's the kind of thing that if there was a fire in the house, what would you grab? It would be these albums. So I would take them.

Presenter34:22

Okay, that's your luxury.

Presenter34:25

Finally, of the eight that you've chosen so carefully, I'm going to force you to pick just one to save from the weights. Which one will it be?

Dame Minouche Shafik34:29

To see

Dame Minouche Shafik34:32

I think it probably has to be the Beethoven because it's so rich and complex and I will need bits of inspiration when I'm alone on this island, so I think it's going to be the Beethoven.

Presenter34:42

Okay, it's yours. Dame Manush Shafiq, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Dame Minouche Shafik34:47

Thank you.

Presenter34:58

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find over 2,000 interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians, and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs. And I have a favour to ask: if you could rate and review the Desert Island Discs podcast wherever you download your podcasts, it'll really help other people find us. Thanks again for listening.

Dame Minouche Shafik35:35

This is the B B C.