I'm Krishnan, Guru Murthy and this is the podcast in which we talked to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives.

On the events that have helped shape thumb.

My guest today was until very recently the CEO off the charity Save the Children.

Before that, she had another fairly important job.

Is the Prime Minister of Denmark on Before that was the leader of the opposition.

She also happens to be married to the Welsh Labour MP Stephen Kinnock.

So she's well acquainted with Britain as well.

Welcome.

Have so much, in fact, that live is I'm very well acquainted with this country.

I mean, you set your CV sounds as though you were born to try to save the world.

Yeah, but I wasn't.

I was not a tool.

Well, whether to come from I don't know.

I grew up in the south of Copenhagen, which is reason to part where no one wants to go and no one wants to live.

Hopefully has changed now, but back then it was It was a place where we had all the issues with immigration, a cultural clash and This was not a particularly a place where a former prime minister would come from.

Grew up with my mom.

My mom and dad got divorced and there was no politicians whatsoever in our family.

So so were you part of an elite?

Were your middle class for No, no, no, no, it lead whatsoever.

Didn't know any politicians, didn't know anyone from the elite at all, and grew up very, very modest conditions.

Actually, with my mom, particularly when they got divorced, the money wasn't great.

Suppose you do.

She was.

She was in a computer in computer science and she got a degree very late in her life.

A swell.

She's an amazing woman.

My mom and I think that sense off the trying to create a fair society comes both from my mom and my dad.

And I remember very clearly when I came home from school, which was just the local school that I went to and said, This is unfair and the teachers are lit this and that.

They would both say to me, Have you tried to change it yourself?

Someone from a very early age.

They've got installed in me that if you see something which is not right or not fair.

You have to try and change is yourself.

Until what extent is that a national characteristic?

And I mean we we in Britain, I just think of yeah.

Everywhere in northern Europe.

Scandinavia is kind of generally sort of quite liberal.

Lefty, social Democrat, you know, high tax, more egalitarian.

Is it true?

It is kind of true.

I mean, we are different from many, many other places in this world.

Now.

I had the opportunity to travel too many parts of this world and see people and meet people and being different countries.

And there's something about the Nordic countries, which is different because we don't accept a country.

We don't accept big inequalities.

We think it's not fair.

We talk about it a lot, and we have developed this welfare state where people pay a lot of tax.

But what they get out of that is a fairly is a fair society and a welfare state that actually is a safety net for many, many people and gives a lot of opportunity as well.

So that was why I was able to to break out.

I got an education I got supported by the state and to make it to a large extent, the fact that they're waas a support system in the in the welfare state made me gave me the opportunities that I used to become too good university to do great things later on, like fun things and also become Prime Minister.

I mean, when you say you know, we don't accept inequality, Yeah, we think it's unfair.

And to what extent is that that we really everybody is there?

Ah, the national feeling.

I would say that we don't think that huge inequalities is a great thing.

I mean, you can be very wealthy in Denmark and some people are and you can be poor in Denmark as well.

But we actually look at the genie cocoa if citizen and look at it, is it growing?

And one of the things I did when I was prime minister was to try and change that bring Children out of poverty and poverty is off course relative in Denmark to other places in the world.

But we are serious about these things than we talked about a lot, and we actually think that tax is also there to try to bring more equality and also is not only about redistribution once you have pay tax, but we also very much.

I'm very into this concept off pre distribution where you also try to give agency and give opportunity to people who are not as advantage when from from their background, How do you think a national characteristic like that comes about on?

Why is it so different in Britain?

I don't know.

I mean, it comes about that No one there's if there's a really positive side to it, which I'm talking about here.

The negative side is that we also have this even if you have been prime minister or you are someone who had standing out in one way or the other.

You can't think of yourself as a special, and that really comes across in many, many areas off Danys life.

And I think too many to a large extent.

It's a great thing when I walk around the streets of Copenhagen or in Denmark and general people will treat me exactly like anyone else.

I talked to everyone there and it's a very qualitative society and that I think that's a great thing and you see it in every part off life there.

So if I asked you to describe Britain's national characteristic comes to equality, what would you say?

I live in London now.

I live in the UK.

I go to Wales quite often, my family's from whales and Steve's constituencies.

Then we got friends and well, so I see many parts off of the U.

K.

And I love this country.

I really, really do.

And I think the the characteristics of the people here and the way we talk to each other the way we are with each other, there's so many things.

It's good to say about the UK, but I also feel that since I've moved over, I came over in 2016.

Things have changed him and there is a distance between us now that didn't exist before.

And I do think that unless things change over the coming years, we will grow further and further apart in the UK and I think that's really, really sad.

Why do you think that?

Because I mean on the Brexit Brexit vote didn't help.

And because it went on for so long and there were it wasn't resolved is still not resolved for so many years.

It just it just meant that Brits grew further and further apart.

But it was something that started before that.

And what is the Brexit?

A symptom or cause It was a symptom.

I think it's a symptom off many, many things.

First of all, the You have not been debated here for 40 years in a in a fair way.

And but it was also a symptom off the divisions in the UK There's always been a bigger division between rich and poor in the UK Now there's also a big division between people who live in the big city centres like London and people living for example, South Wales, where I come a lot.

I mean, the division there is really quite palatable.

If you go from from London to one of those places, you feel the difference is almost like turning up on a different planet.

When you arrive at the Park Talbot Parkway and and go out to society there, people are poor, they have less opportunity and they see the world in a different way, and I think those divisions between rich and poor towns and cities, people who feel that globalization is a great thing and people who are a little bit more reserved to watch globalization.

People who have been deeply affected by the lack of industrial politics policies.

In this country, people have any air degree people who don't I mean, there's so many divisions, and then the added one now is the division between young and old.

Where were you have a younger didn't generation that don't have the same hopes for their future as we did when we were younger.

So I think you see many divisions and it's not helping with trying to bridge all those those gaps that exist in the UK Now it's why did you go into politics?

I don't know.

I went into politics.

I was very hours interest in politics.

Very early on, I was.

My political awareness really started with the feminist movement off the seventies.

I listened very carefully to that.

I listened to the songs around the feminist movement on.

I just couldn't understand why men and women didn't have the same rights and same opportunity, so that's where it started in the seventies.

You were tiny.

I know I became a feminist when I was 10 or 11 years old.

That was my first political awakening, and that's as also stay what I I feel very connected to.

Then there was the apartheid movement, which I got super involved in.

It sounds weird that a a young white girl in the northern part off Europe could be involved in apartheid.

But that was really something that spoke to my feeling off things.

They're not fair here.

This is so unfair.

So you would find me and demonstrations in the eighties singing free Nelson Mandela.

I don't know how much it actually helped in freeing Nelson Mandela, but it helped in terms of changing my political outlook and also making me think that I could be part off trying to create a better world, even though I was just a tiny, tiny person in that whole jigsaw off trying, trying to create a better world.

But I felt part of a global community at progressive global community, and since then, basically I have felt part of that the global progressive community that our step by step trying to change the world.

I mean, you mentioned South Africa.

We all remember the images of you taking the selfie with Obama on the cameras.

The service for Nelson Mandela had you got to meet him?

Yes.

I met him as prime Minister, not as prime minister.

I met him many years before.

This was before we took pictures of everything to prove that it existed.

So I don't actually have a picture of it.

I have to dig deeper to find it by having met Nelson Mandela.

He made us as deep impression on me as he as he did on everyone else who met him and saw him.

So, yes, he meant a lot to my political thinking and still does in many, many ways.

And you remember your interaction with him.

I was very young at the time.

I was.

I think I was leader of my party at the at the time, and I just had a brief encounter with him, but he made an impression on me.

But I think he's the whole story and the way he came out of apartheid, what he did to South Africa, that was just part of my political thinking in the nineties.

And I am a child may basically off the eighties and nineties and the nineties was a golden era.

If you believed in politics, if you believe that, you could be part of something beak and change things.

This was a year with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and politics and the breakdown of the Berlin Wall.

And these were the years where we thought people were young.

That time we can be part of changing the world for the better.

And if we just join hands on and on enough people who want the progressive future, we will be able to create that.

Do you still feel as positive about that period?

I mean, you talk about it with great enthusiasm.

A lot of people now look back at that period and say it was a huge disappointment.

You know?

That's the promise.

Yeah, you know, lead to terrible things, whether it was the Iraq war or banking deregulation or, you know, a rising inequality.

All those sort of, you know, actually what was going on there, even though you felt this was a great time to try and change the world actually led to some very bad things.

I don't agree with that.

I think that the nineties and what happened in the nineties was a great what were great years for actually seeing really change in global politics.

And when the Berlin Wall came down, that is, that had a lasting effect on European integration.

What we are today in the European Union, the fact that we could actually reunite with countries that belong to this to the Soviet block before they came in and they had a lot they created lasting democracy, lasting change.

Just look at the Baltic states that came in back then that created lasting change and expanded democracy across the European continent.

Thio degree.

That hasn't changed since and created that the new game new agencies to NATO agency to new countries, but also individuals across the European continent.

That is surely a very positive thing.

Did we make that?

Were there mistakes made in the nineties?

Of course there were.

But I also think we drew some very important lessons about international politics, but also how you can change Europe for the better.

And I do think that that created lasting change.

So I mean, you have these causes that you believed in.

Was there any doubt in your mind that achieving political office was the way to change the world rather than being an activist.

I always believed in political office.

I was an activist for a very short time of my life.

But I always felt that really politics and where you really changed things, is when you meet your political opponent, try to change things with them.

Listen, have a dialogue.

Reese Consensus reached a compromise.

These are things I believe passionate in still, am a passionate pragmatist in the way that I really believe that real change comes when you go into government, when you actually change things with other people, and when you stopped to accept that you can't always have it your own way, you have to reach a compromise.

And one of the things that I am so saddened about these days is that the art of compromise has become become something negative in politics.

The fact that you create a middle ground and that's good enough has become something negative, almost something that is a a sign of weakness in politicians these days.

But back then, it was something that what was good and that's always been the driver for me, that you can't you can't strive for getting it just your own way.