So, you've written a novel [Rare Earth]… presumably because there simply isn't enough economics news at the moment?

I actually wrote it in 2009 when we were in a bit of a lull. And I was in China and it just hit me that you are never going to tell the story of China factually because so much of it is hidden from you. They're going to have their Katrina and their riots and you'll never know about it. The novel starts in the same way as the Newsnight story I did, in pursuit of corruption and a pollution scandal and I just saw where that took me. Although when the ghosts come in is when it slightly diverges from reality. The ghosts and the crazed female biker gang.

Ah yes, the 'Steel Fuchsias' girl gang…they seemed like they might be the construct of some sort of middle-aged male fantasy?

Well, they're not a male fantasy because if you saw the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China you would have seen a bunch of women goose-stepping through Tiananmen Square in pink miniskirts and white leather boots. I was wondering whose male fantasy that was to put them in the Communist party parade.

Some of your characters are Chinese but at times they sound like they could be from Wigan.

Yes, but when you go to the industrial part of China, when you are among ordinary Chinese people, it is a bit like being in 1970s England. I had a moment where I was sat in a room full of bureaucrats who ran the communist state trade union and the icebreaker was when I said my dad was a miner and they suddenly softened. You simply felt that despite all the cultural barriers you had met somebody similar to yourself.

You're a classic working-class grammar school boy made good, aren't you?

Absolutely. I am so classic it is painful.

Do you think that you would have the same opportunities if you were growing up now?

No, and I am outraged by it actually. What is tragic is that young people can more easily see themselves becoming celebrities earning a million than they can earning £40,000 and having a company car. We have just got to find a new way of giving ordinary people in the west the hope that they can live a decent life. It shouldn't be beyond us: we are not poor countries for one thing.

Economics has traditionally been seen as rather a dry subject but now it's at the centre of everything, isn't it?

It is. Because economics has become about people and their troubles, and elites and hubris, and you can't understand how economics models work from a graph. You have got to be out on the streets to understand. There was a really interesting 65-year-old guy in Athens who shook me by the arm and said: "You have to listen to me. If Greece goes, everybody else will die. America will die, Europe will die." He was 65 and he was probably right. And where else would I have met him? At Davos? No.

The Daily Telegraph is convinced you're a pinko. Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?

No. I haven't.

Wikipedia has you pegged as a one-time Trot and member of Workers' Power.

The BBC won't allow us to talk about our politics so if I told you what my politics were at college I would then have to explain to you what my politics are now and, in Facebook terms, they fall under that tick box "It's Complicated". The throughline of my reporting is about people and actually it is about social justice and I will defend that. What I am trying to do is get to the detail, the gritty, granular, uncomfortable detailed reality of what social injustice means.

You once wrote a musical about the miners' strike, didn't you? That must have been jolly.

I wrote the music to a play about the 30 miners who were the only ones who went on strike in Leicester. One of my best friends at the end of it said: "I hate agitprop." So that probably was the most acute critical judgment we had on it. I was a musician and a musicologist in my 20s. And I just got to the age of 29 and wasn't making any money and I thought, 'Well, I just need to do something else'.

Do you think we are going to look back on 2011 as the year everything changed?

I think we might look back on 2011 and 2012 as the years everything changed. And what has happened in 2011 is the nice bit. In 2012, we are going to get economic double dip. That's the minimum. Combined with all the harsh realities of revolution, at the centre of which is who gets what.

You've got another nonfiction book coming out in January [Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions], your third, as well as this novel. Are you a workaholic?

Having got to a very prestigious platform quite late in my career, and having started late as a journalist, and having had my dad die in his 50s, it does make you think: "Do your maximum now." Having said that, I'm not sure I'll write another novel. Though I will be quite interested to see if people do tear it to shreds or enter it for the Bad Sex awards.

Some of the scenes are quite graphic… Did you worry about being ribbed by your Newsnight colleagues?

No, you can't. Once the characters existed, it was clear that some of them would fall in love with others. And others would embark on strange surreal sexual adventures. They just became real and started mating with each other.

You're taking no responsibility for your more fruity scenes?

If anyone wants to query the authenticity of it, I will show them the academic source literature for Mongolian horseback sex. It exists.

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