Welcome to Tiskey Sauer. I have some very distinguished guests with me this evening for what will be a jam-packed show and Pettifor, economist and author and director of Prime Economics. Welcome to the show. Hi. And Tom Kobassie, who, as you know, is director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, but, and this is important, we'll be speaking in a personal capacity this evening. Hi, Michael. What we're going to talk about is Boris Johnson's Brexit negotiations. Are they really going on? And at the end of the show, we're going to talk about Pettifor's new book, The Case for the Green New Deal. But first of all, this weekend has been the Lib Dem Party Conference. The story that has dominated the conference is the Lib Dem's proposal to revoke Article 50 without a second referendum. We knew this last week, and myself and Aaron spoke about what we think of that policy last Friday. But what's been interesting since then is seeing Lib Dem MPs respond to interrogation of whether this seemingly quite extreme policy, in our view at least, is a good idea. So we're going to start with some clips of how Lib Dem politicians are getting comfortable or not with this new position. We're going to start with Swinson, who was interviewed yesterday on Channel 4 News. At that election. Also, it hasn't worked. No problem. Just give me a shout when it has worked. So we're having a little bit of a problem with the clips today. In any case, that was Swinson talking to obviously the highest of Channel 4 News. Who was asking her whether or not revoking Article 50 would have enough democratic legitimacy. He was making... Oh, it's ready now, is it? I don't have to explain it to you verbatim. You're going to see it from the horse's mouth. Okay, I don't think you have seen it still. We are going to sort this out, but maybe we won't worry about clips for a little while. Okay, so as we know, the Lib Dem conference have agreed to revoke Article 50. There on Channel 4 News, Joe Swinson was being asked about the policy and whether it had any democratic legitimacy. What the host was pointing out was that in a referendum when we voted to leave 17 million people voted, it's very unlikely that the Lib Dems will get that much support. You can win a majority with only 35% of the vote. She didn't really have an answer. I think she was struggling with that a little bit. I don't know if the problem was with that particular clip or with clips in general, because we can potentially show another one. Yeah? Let's see if this one works. Or if it doesn't, don't worry about it. Okay, don't worry about it. The other one was that Sam Gema was being interviewed on Politics Live by Joe Coburn, obviously. And he was asked whether or not he was comfortable with this revoke Article 50 position. What you would have seen if our clips were working today is that he sidesteps the question. So he sort of says, look, I think you've actually misrepresented our position. What I think is really important is that this goes back to the people. And he makes a load of quite coherent and good arguments for a people's vote, which isn't the Lib Dem position.  The one thing the Lib Dems had going for them when it came to Brexit was a clear position. They were the party that was for a people's vote and was going to campaign for a main. Now they've said, with a party for revoke, but when they are pushed on it, they say, oh, maybe we don't actually want to revoke. That's only if we win a majority, which is unlikely anyway. So basically, we're still the party of the people's vote. I don't know what you think is what's going on here, Tom. Well, I think last night at Davey said that they were in favor of a people's vote. But if they could not secure a people's vote, then they would have revoke as a fallback, which makes no sense because, of course, the only circumstances in which they would be able to implement revoke would be if they'd won a majority. And if they'd won a majority, they could surely organize a people's vote. So the whole thing is clearly incoherent. But I think the best description of it that I've heard is that this is the politics of a pressure group. Not a serious political party. And I think the reason it's become so obvious in the way that it sort of unfolded in the last 24 hours is that everyone can see that this is fundamentally undemocratic. And actually, you don't resolve the Brexit crisis by sticking two fingers up to the 17 million people who voted to leave in a democracy.  So I don't think this is serious politics. I think it's childish. I think that it probably divides the groups that want to remain when actually they could unite around the demand for a second referendum because the political class is not being able to solve the problem. But this is just childish politics and we should dismiss it as a fundamentally unserious political party. And it's so unserious that it's going to ensure that the Brexiters win in seats where they could be defeated. It seems to me anyway, by dividing the votes essentially, they're going to get a Brexit government and the Brexit government, if it's led by Johnson, is going to do the crazy thing of a no deal. So their politics, and I think it's probably not that I'm much of an expert on these things, but pretty juvenile politics, is actually also incredibly damaging to their cause. Well, I was thinking from this conference that potentially the one silver lining from it. I mean, I suppose I don't have that much invested in it anyway. But whilst everyone on the left is critiquing Joe Swinson because she was also on Channel 4 News. Maybe we'll get it up later. Maybe we won't. Talking about how she is basically in favour of austerity. So she's asked about the fact that the Conservatives seem to have gone back on their belief in fiscal propensity or whatever and that they're spending money and all these things. And she says, look, well, they're pointing to a magic money tree. This doesn't make sense. They have to make tough choices. You have to make tough choices in government. Basically positioned herself to the right of the Conservative Party, which in a way is incredibly lucky, fortunate for the Labour Party because that, to my mind, suggests that potentially they're only going to take right-wing votes. And anyone who is remotely left-wing is going to see that you have to vote Labour or you'll get a Tory government. Yeah, I think a lot of left-in-client voters are just going to find that repulsive. But I think the voters she's clearly targeting are people who voted for Cameron and Osborne in 2015. So she's trying to fish from that particular pool of voters who are in favour of austerity and a pro-European sort of Tory Remainers and if that's the party that she wants to create, then, as you say, that's probably, if anything, to Labour's advantage because it splits the vote on the right. And you're from, I know you're involved in another Europe is possible. I don't know how deeply. Yes, I'm there. Mainly I, you know, there to talk about the economic side of things. But in terms of gossip, do you think anyone's going to be particularly attracted by this revoke article 50 position or is everyone quite resolute behind the ban for people vote? No, I mean, another Europe is very keen often to distinguish itself from the mainstream Remain campaigns, you know, from those led by Blair and Coe. And so, no, no, I don't think there's any danger of that at all because another Europe is a left-wing Remain. And it's a very, I have found it an extremely difficult place to be, really, to argue from the left. There are plenty of lexatives in the Labour Party. And there's very little on the economic front that one can commend about the eurozone and the euro. And that's exactly why the Liberals, I think, like it. You know, they've been mad European, they've been so pro-Europe for a very long time. They are essentially globalisers.  So I don't think there's any danger at all of another Europe falling for this. I mean, I think we'll be very distinct. And the Labour Party has seemed to remain fairly united around this. Although there are some people, so Sadiq Khan was on Andrew Maher and he had a slightly odd position, which was that we're going to revoke article 50 and then have a people's vote. It seems like there are a lot of people who are now trying to position themselves with a slightly different position to Jeremy Corbyn somewhat for the sake of it because I don't know why you would piss off the public by revoking article 50 when you could just extend it, which I think would presumably be much easier to gain democratic consent for. I think, but the thing is, Tom, you know, there is such a lack of clarity. I mean, there's great clarity on the Tory side as they're not on the far right of the Tory party. We want to leave with Brexit, with the people versus the parliament, you know. And she's now got a very simple, clear thing. And then you have on the remain side or on the other bit of the spectrum all of these various variations on, you know, people's vote and revoking article and so on. So don't you think that clarity between extreme right of the Tory party and the Liberals is going to be a danger for the left? I think it's potentially a danger, but I think you'll see Labour's position evolve at conference next week. And actually, one of the advantages of what's happened the last few days is that all of this stuff about Labour's position being confused has been revealed to be a kind of performative expression of an inability to understand something that I think is still pretty straightforward. Labour is saying very explicitly that the Labour Party is in favour of letting the people decide on Brexit because it wants to be a responsible, serious government. It wants to offer two options, both of which are workable and can be implemented. One is to remain in the European Union, which means revoking article 50 after referendum. And the other is a plan that could be executed and so it would be probably the withdrawal agreement that was negotiated by Theresa May plus Labour's version of the political declaration, which we already know the European Union leaders have supported because actually when Jeremy Corbyn wrote to Theresa May back in February and said, look, I'm prepared to support a deal if it meets these criteria, if you remember Donald Tusk and Barnier and Juncker all came out and said, well, maybe Labour's plan is a way to break the impulse and actually said that they supported it. So I think Labour's saying, look, here are two serious options. We know that the overwhelming majority of the Labour Party is in favour of remain. We know that Jeremy himself in 2016 voted to remain and campaign to remain. So I'm not sure it's that unclear. I think there's been a lot of people saying it's desperately unclear, but they're saying it's unclear because they want to attack Labour not because the position is actually unclear. Because the thing I keep pointing out is if you're going to have a referendum, what are you going to have a Lib Dem referendum that is between remain and remain harder? What is this?  And I think I'm meaning more the muddying of the waters by the Sadiq Khan's of the school and by the right of the Labour Party. And that's what annoys me personally. I'm an old Labour Party member and disloyalty to the leader in my youth, in my campaigning youth, was a crime for which you could be expelled if not executed, you know. And yet here we have very senior members of the Labour Party attacking and dividing in the roll-up to a general election that I've heard of. But to be fair, I'm not sure that Jeremy Corbyn who rebelled 500 times is necessarily someone who's going to have a problem with a kind of pluralist party where people say different things. I think the issue is that when you identify people like Tom Watson who come out with a particular position, it's because it's clearly done in bad faith. The demand to have a referendum before a general election is not because he sincerely believes that's the right thing for the country. It's clearly designed to find more division within the Labour Party. And I think the critique is not that sometimes people hold different positions. Actually, I feel relatively comfortable. There are some people in the Labour Party who support Lexi. I think they're wrong, but I can respect the fact that they sincerely believe it. What I can't respect is people who don't seem to have any real position, but all of their positions are really based on trolling the Labour Party more widely. And that I think we should have no time for. But I don't think there should be a political... I'm a pluralist Democrat. I don't think we should have a political party where you have to swear fidelity to the leader or face execution. That's not the kind of party we should have on the left. But equally, you can at the same time criticize the people and the whole motive is to sow division and disunity as an end in itself. I want to mop up the Lib Dem issue first. So the other big story we saw over the weekend was that they are gaining Tory MPs by the day. So the big one they had this weekend was Sam Jima earlier in the week. It was Philip Blee. Again, I'm not sure this is getting them headlines, which is good. I mean, what Stephen Busch always says in the new statement is that if you are the third party, one of the main challenges is for people to notice you and know who you are and the fact that they have defections. I don't know if it counts as a defection when you... I suppose Sam Jima is a defection, but many other people who came from Labour then changed, then independent, then the Lib Dem. That's hardly a defection. It doesn't count as a defection, really, does it? But I don't know if you think this... Polititourism or something. Yeah, this assemblage of politicians from various political factions who have never been elected as a Lib Dem but found themselves on the Lib Dem benches. Is this going to be an electoral asset? Or are they, I suppose, muddying their brand, as it were? Well, I think their challenge is that now that they've become the party of revoke, that is really all that there is about them. And then by embracing all these people who don't seem to have anything clear in common in the sense they don't have a clear point of view on the world means that it's unclear what they stand for beyond revoking Article 50. And so I think that really is a problem for them. What they've taken on is sort of a series of different political chameleons but I think they'll find it very, very hard strategically if Brexit dissipates in its salience as an issue, then what are the Lib Dems for? They're going to find that very, very tough. Anyone in particular? Any new Lib Dem MPs that you feel are a particular, I don't know what's the word, liability for them. They said that when Philip Lee was first joined the Lib Dems, then the person who I think was chair of the LGBT Lib Dem Society left because he had opposed gay marriage. Sam Gimer, I think, sort of filibusted when the SNP had sort of promoted some sort of motion about pardoning, all ensuring, wasn't it, I think. So I don't know if they're going to have another Tim Farron moment, but they've really actually damaged the Lib Dems in the sense that they just couldn't really get any... I mean, if the Liberal Democrats aren't liberal, if they don't have social liberalism on their side, it is quite difficult for them to stake the claim to represent the values which I suppose Joe Swinson is consistently saying is what the Lib Dems are now about. So I think that's true and I think you can draw some distinctions between when these politicians were members of other political parties and were they simply complying with the whip and following the stated position of their party. So for example, if you look at the Tory defectors, you'll see that they voted for the bedroom tax and they voted against restraint on bankers' bonuses and all these kind of issues, but they were essentially voting on party lines. I think it was Philip Lee in particular, there were a couple of instances that are really significant and people have to pay attention to. So one was the free vote on gay marriage. He made his own decision to vote against it. No one was telling him he had to vote against it.  I think the other thing that hasn't had enough attention paid to it is about this issue about people with HIV and being able to come as immigrants or visitors to this country. And I don't think people necessarily fully appreciate what a retrograde step that would be. So actually the United Nations in I think 2016 or 2017 had a universal declaration saying this should end this practice of discriminating against people with HIV because it was discriminatory and deeply counterproductive. And at the moment I think the number of countries in the world that discriminate on that basis is very, very small. So you're putting yourself into a category with Russia and Saudi Arabia to do that. There's no European country other than Ukraine that actually has these kind of discriminatory measures against people with HIV. The US doesn't, Canada doesn't, almost no Latin American country does, almost no African country does. So this is a really extreme and vicious measure. And I think it's really actually a really evil thing to have done. I actually spent a number of years working on HIV work with the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria. And huge numbers of activists around the world put huge amounts of effort into stopping these kind of policies and the enormous harm that they do. And I don't think it's something that you can just brush over and say, oh well that was in the past and now Philippine doesn't buy Brexit and so it's all fine. I think that needs more attention being paid to it. And I think as a result you're right, that I think a lot of Lib Dem activists will say well why are they welcoming people like that into the party or the people who really probably belong in the Brexit party or in the Democratic Football Alliance or some other far-right grouping. The thing that alarms me is Chuck Ramona and the fact that he's been the candidate for the Westminster seat. I mean I'm no great expert on these things as I say but he is a proper old windbag. That's a technical term for it. I'm saying this from direct experience but to listen to him at a party fundraiser when he had nothing to say but went on for a very long time. Can you imagine? I think it's brilliant he's gone there because... He's now going to represent the bankers. Their biggest problem I think at the Lib Dems now is hubris. I mean, Jo Swinson seems to genuinely believe she's going to be the next Prime Minister. Chuck Ramona has called himself the Shadow Foreign Secretary and I think that many of the sort of bizarre decisions they're making are due to the hubris of that pair. I want to move us on to... I do think there is a perverse poetic justice though in Chuck becoming the representative of the city of London. Should he win that seat? And as I've said for a while I think being Chuck Ramona is his greatest crime but being Chuck Ramona is also his greatest punishment. So the idea that he'll spend five years as a Lib Dem MP for the city of London has that sort of perverse poetic justice to it. I know a lot of activists in the city of London, Westminster in the city of London, we've got to be backing and supporting them and I wasn't questioning that but should that outcome occur? I think there will be something strangely joyful in it. Boris Johnson's renegotiation strategy. I want to know what's going on. I'm not that sure. I'm actually going to take another risk so we're going to try and do a clip and if it doesn't work what I'm going to do is I'm going to pitch to you as to why you need to give us money because I know it's not the fault of James Fox who is expertly doing our editing today in place of Gary. It's because of our software. We need to upgrade our software to be much smoother and to do that we need a little bit more dough. I'm going to tell you how you can donate for us first. I'm going to tell you how you can donate for us in a minute but first of all I'm going to try and play this goddamn clip. So Boris Johnson went to Luxembourg yesterday for talks with the EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Luxembourg's leader Javier Betel. We're going to talk about the substance of those talks in a moment but first of all it would be remiss for us at Navarre Media to turn up any opportunity to show Johnson in front of a booing crowd. So this hopefully is the aftermath of that meeting. Thank you very much for listening to me. I think demonstrating is a right in a democracy and it is important also to be able to exchange and to listen to each other. I wanted to thank Mr Johnson who was here today for the exchange that we had. For me it was important to listen to Prime Minister Johnson to listen to concrete proposals to avoid a non-deal Brexit. Fabulous piece of political fear today. There's been a bit of a ferrari and uproar in Britain where Brexit is saying that the President of... Is he the President and the Prime Minister or any of you? The Prime Minister of Luxembourg has offended and disrespected Boris Johnson by having the press conference too close to a jeering crowd and then empty podiuming him and then essentially ripping into him for quite a long time. I just watched about ten minutes of it and it was him just constantly saying this Tory party they have messed up the UK this is not our problem. What we are expecting is for them to come with positive proposals to Europe and they have not done it. So I wanted to ask about, I suppose first of all what you think about this kind of theatre but mainly the substance of it. So EU Chiefs are saying that Boris Johnson has not really taken any concrete proposals as to what their alternative is to the backstop. I know you follow these things quite closely Tom. Do you think at this point Boris Johnson is genuinely looking for no deal and trying to find someone to blame or is there a deal which is in the making but he just for one reason or another has not yet proposed it to the Europeans? Well, so I think the first thing to understand about Boris Johnson is I don't think he cares either way on Brexit. So for him, Brexit is a means to gain and retain power and that's what it always has been. That's why he joined the Leave side in 2016 because he thought it was a way to give Cameron a good run for his money and then be able to topple Cameron from his position and win the leadership of the Tory party and I don't think that positioning has really changed ever since then. I don't think for Cameron, so for Johnson that Brexit's ever been a true objective. It's really about gaining and retaining power. So as a result, I think he's going to be relatively flexible on his strategy. So clearly the first strategy was to provoke this confrontation with Parliament and then try and run a people versus Parliament general election, consolidate the right, get the Brexit party supporters on board and try and win a majority. So that was his first attempt. That was kind of blocked by Parliament saying not only would it block no deal but it would actually block an election until that had been executed. So I think now he's pivoting towards getting a deal and he's reheating Theresa May's strategy. So what does that consist of? Well, one, it's Theresa May's withdrawal agreement. I think the reason that he hasn't written down a proposal yet is that he knows as soon as he writes something down, everyone will tear into it. Here especially, right? Here especially but also elsewhere. So I think what he wants to do is to, that the second plank of it is then to pretend that you can have no deal. So he keeps banging on about no deal and the incredible hulk and all this nonsense when actually the practical reality is that no deal is not an option on the 31st of October because it's against the law. So it's quite straightforward. He can bluster all he likes but it's been taken off the table by responsible parliamentarians led by the Labour Party. So where that leaves him is trying to get this deal and what he will do I think is at the 11th hour say, here's an answer, it will basically be an unpacked version of the backstop. So all the stuff that's actually contained in the backstop but basically turned into five bullet points rather than one and say well it's not the backstop, it's actually just a regulatory alignment zone. Well actually that's exactly what was in the backstop. It's not the backstop but it's a phytosanitary zone on the island of Ireland. All these kind of things to essentially recreate what the backstop does but not giving people time to rally in opposition. Get the EU hopefully to agree to it will be his hope and then to get parliament to support it and that strategy again is exactly the same as Theresa May. Talk up no deal even though it's always been a political hoax.  I don't think this is going to work partly because I think the ELG die-hards are really clearly there. I think I can't see why any Labour member of Parliament would want to give a hard right Conservative Party with Dominic Raab, Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson, you know Pretty Patel and her plans to bring back Hange and all these things. Why they would want to hand them an enormous victory in the general election to fulfil the principle political objective of the right of British politics which is to take Britain out of the EU so they can deliver a hard right vision for British society. I don't think that Stephen Kinnick has the 26 MPs that he's claiming and I think what we'll see is that if Johnson does bring a deal back it will fail yet again just like it failed for Theresa May. Oh god it's so boring isn't it? It's so impressive. Thank you. You're supposed to say that after the show. Yeah exactly. Michael says me all the time. I think you look for a British public just having to grind through this over and over again without any resolution to this thing and without any politician or political party really being able to solve it. You're right Anne but I do think this idea that what is great gaining traction I think is the idea that no deals clean break and as I wrote in my Guardian yesterday, no deal is in fact a dirty bomb not a clean break and no deal is in fact a plan to drag Brexit into the mid-2020s so no deal doesn't end this pain. No deal just means it drags it out even longer. Absolutely. What I'm not so sure about in your analysis is that it really is off the table you know. I mean do these guys care about the law? I'm very worried about that because like you I think it is a dirty bomb. It's a good way of talking about it but is it really off the table? It's never been on the table it's a fantasy because the core problem with no deal is that it's not just no deal with the Europeans it's no deal with anyone and so the kind of systemic chaos that you would create I don't think the British public would tolerate it for a moment and certainly any government that inflicted that degree of chaos would be punished at the ballot box at the first available opportunity so do you think therefore it's off the table? Yeah which is exactly why why did Johnson want the election on the 15th of October precisely because that would precede the 30th of October and this no deal and he wouldn't have to deal with the consequences Exactly. Now do I think he'd be prepared to go for no deal if he thought it was the only way to stay in power or to win power? Absolutely because I don't think he cares for the consequences for the country I think the issue is if you understand no deal to be something that is inherently so chaotic and damaging that actually it will force the political party out of power not keep it in power that's why it's not on the table not because I think they care about the country but because I think that he knows if he goes for a no deal and they're the general election they will definitely lose that election The strategy you're suggesting is very high risk though because I can see that makes a lot of sense actually as to why Boris Johnson hasn't proposed anything to the European Union because he thinks it will get taken apart this side of the channel because he's basically willing to roll over and give them everything they want but I mean the risk would be if he's based his strategy on getting Brexit party voters then if he comes back, if he passes that I think potentially he could just stay in power for a while and everything could be cushy maybe he can rebuild the conservatives reputation with economic conservatives who are somewhat socially moderate or whatever on the 17th or whatever with a deal which is the Brexit party's worst nightmare because it fundamentally looks like May's deal and then it loses then he's really in the worst of both worlds isn't he because then he's he's just Theresa May again So possibly but I think that because he'll present it as being a good deal that doesn't have the backstop in it what he'll say is he'll say look I wanted us out of the EU on the 31st of October and I was prepared to take us out with no deal and Parliament blocked that I then went to Brussels and negotiated a good deal that was much better than Theresa May and again Parliament blocked that so now if you want Brexit you have to give me a majority because what we've seen the last few months is that these remainder parliamentarians will block Brexit at any cost because they are determined to stay in the EU so I think he'll just be able to pivot away from losing into that's why you need to give me a majority he'll just claim that his deal was much better than May's was and the ERG will go with that well I think the sort of rump of the ERG, the kind of Steve Baker Mark Francois crowd you know they are never going to be satisfied if it was no deal they'd be saying well why aren't we shelling Brussels right they would always accelerate at one more level they'd be like well if we're leaving we want reparations for 43 years of membership give us our membership fees back so there would always be something that they would escalate to so I think you just have to assume that the kind of swivel eye loons will always try and escalate it further to some extent you just have to write that off they're never going to come and support any deal because what is driving them is some sort of psychological issue that clearly is embedded within them this is not a real political stance and a fair few of them are in cabinet right and that gets a few more numbers on the payroll for Theresa May, Pretty Patel I think voted against Theresa May's deal all three times so that's now someone who will be voting with the government I think also potentially the fact that he's made it he's pushed all people who are a bit remaining inclined to argue so strongly against no deal means that then he can say well you look a bit silly now if you're not going to vote for my deal it was no deal you said it was so dangerous potentially anyway I think we should move on to your new book oh thank you very much I'm relieved considering if I'm Brexit so boring I think it'd be remiss for us not to move on now to it I find it boring too let's be honest before we go on to a Green New Deal you're watching Tiskey Sour you're watching Navarra Media as you know this is only possible because of your kind support so if you are already a subscriber thank you very much if not please go to support.navarramedia.com as you know our ask is for the equivalent of one hours wage a month so we can keep making these shows more regular and all the clips will work and the sound will work and everything will be beautiful including me because I'll start getting haircuts I've started cutting my own hair because I'm you know it's a bit tight at the moment but yeah go to support.navarramedia.com give some super chat so I can get my hair cut before the world transformed speaking of the world transformed Navarra Media is going to have a very big presence this year at the World Transformed and Labour Party conference on Saturday night we'll be having an episode of Tiskey Sour on the Green New Deal so some of the issues we talked about today will be debated with James Midway, Sakina Shake and Steve Turner who's Assistant General Secretary of Unite on Sunday me and Ash are going to be hosting the Radical Variety Show with Diane Abbott John McDonnell, Ed Miliband there's going to be game shows Ash is writing the jokes obviously I'm just going to read them off a card and hopefully deliver it correctly on Monday we have a Brexit debate which is going to be with Len McCluskey, Yanis Varifakis and Ash Sarkar and on Tuesday we have a show on the future of Labour with Paul Mason, Grace Blakely and David Lambie MP all of these events are now set up on our YouTube so you can click to make sure you get a notification when we go live I will be taking some of your questions there even though it's a live show with a live audience as ever keep your comments coming I'll go to questions in a moment like this video share it on Twitter tell all your friends about Navarra Media also tell all your friends about Ann Pettifor's new book The Case for a Green New Deal tell us the pitch why did you feel like you needed to write this book right now well the real reason is that there's a great deal of heat around the whole issue of the Green New Deal mainly thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but also because Bernie Sanders now has just launched there's a great deal of heat and this has to be transformed into power as far as I'm concerned and it won't be unless we know how to pay for it unless we can talk about how to pay for it and I don't think the left has started to think about how to pay for this I think we run away from these issues because it's about monetary policy, monetary theory largely and we think it's vague and we think it's obscure expert stuff operating out there in the stratosphere and we don't deal with it nor do the Greens the Greens talk about the ecology a great deal but they won't talk about the economy and when they do talk about change they talk about change in terms of individual behaviour and also change in terms of community behaviour they don't talk about systemic change and I'm arguing here that in order for us to be able to implement the Green New Deal to transform our economy away from its addiction to fossil fuels and to enable us to move away from that addiction we need to transform not just our economy but our global financial system we have to effectively de-globalise the economy as my view and I argue that that's how the New Deal actually functioned in the first place and what's so for me what is so extraordinary about what Roosevelt did, President Roosevelt did on the night of his inauguration 3rd of March 1933 on that night he decided to dismantle the gold standard it was the equivalent of globalisation it was a form of globalisation it was governed by the bankers essentially and he'd had enough of that his inauguration speech is about how we have to chase the money lenders from the temple of our democracy and he the first thing he does on the night of the inauguration in his office at the White House is to say I want the bankers to hand over their gold and off the gold standard and I'm going to ask the public to do that and I want to do that tomorrow, Sunday and his advisers say to him no no you can't do that because it's a holy day you've got to wait until Monday so they decide to close the banks on the Monday mainly because they wanted to manage the banks but they knew they couldn't manage the banks without transforming the international system and that's what I want greens and left wingers and progressive people to understand it's no good talking about our domestic economy we've got to change the international system and the question is how and what do we have to do I want to take a few steps back in your book there's a lot of discussion about how we need to transform the financial system and how our economies work wholesale I find it interesting that in your article in The Guardian today you made it sound quite a lot simpler finding the Green New Deal so you sort of said don't worry about the Green New Deal but in itself what we need to do or what the state needs to do is basically borrow money because it's quite cheap for the state to borrow and you need to encourage savers to invest in government bonds basically to lend the government money so not lend, invest in the Green New Deal pension funds etc it made it sound to me quite simple it made it seem like this was all possible in the here and now oh well that's terribly disappointing because maybe I should have read it closer I think the book has seven chapters The Guardian told me I couldn't do it in more than 700 words and what I'm trying to get through to people is the notion of money in the first instance and credit and what it is and we all know what it is but we don't know what it is in relation to governments essentially and and I just think so what I was trying to say in my article today is that there's only two sources of finance and the one is credit and the other is existing savings and there's a limited pool of existing savings and then there's credit and as you know when you go shopping and you spend on your credit card there's no money in the bank so credit isn't isn't somebody else's savings you're not dipping into somebody's savings and governments can both and they've got this credit there what I called a giant credit card and they can raise money from banks they can raise money from commercial banks and they can raise money from the bank of England of course is that borrowing in normal persons language in simple jargon is that just borrowing from banks if you think that spending on your credit card is borrowing yes it is do you think of spending on your credit card as borrowing I've only ever had the debit card I've got the credit rating all the responsibility to get a credit card okay so spending on your credit card isn't borrowing all you're doing is promising to pay at the end of the month so money all money is credit it starts with credit and all credit is a promise to pay it's not bars of gold it's not bars of silver it's not a commodity it's just this social human thing of I promise now that promise is upheld by contract law it's upheld by the accountancy system it's upheld by the banking system the banking helps me to keep my promises I spend on my credit card and at the end of the month the bank reminds me I have to pay for that and the contract tells me if I don't I'll go to jail so the key thing I want to get through is that money is something that's created effortlessly or the ability to spend money is something that we can create almost effortlessly but it's underpinned by public institutions which are the criminal justice system which makes sure that I complete the contract the accountancy system the taxation system and the taxation system is so important I always tell people because I've worked a lot in Africa that we have the ability here to to create our own money basically to create our own promises and to fulfill them really if you go to Malawi they don't have an independent central bank it's been pretty crooked in the past they don't have a taxation system they don't collect tax revenues they don't have tax revenues they don't have income to pay for the credit card they don't have a trusted accountancy system for managing assets and liabilities so as a result of all of those absence of those public institutions they have no money they have to borrow somebody else's monetary system the US dollar or sterling or Japanese yen or Chinese blah so I'm trying to say is that we have these public institutions we pay for them as taxpayers they exist to enable us to create money enable us to spend money so when I make a promise to pay I can go in and buy a washing machine with my credit card and that gives me some capacity but it does depend on me gaining income to pay for it and if the government spends as well the government can spend on credit and then it collects tax revenues to pay just like my pay at the end of the month so this is a fabulous wonderful important public good just like our sanitation system it's a public good that enables us to create money to make things now it has to be managed it has to be balanced I have to pay my bills the credit card system doesn't work and as you say I have to have a level of income in order to have a credit card but the fact of the matter is and the really thing I want to get upon who controls that wonderful magic system that creates our credit and at the moment it's 1% it's the 1% who run it and my concern is that we the people should collectively manage the monetary system that it should be managed by public authority not private authority that's my big story really and I don't want to ramble too much but I want to tell you a lovely beautiful story about Keynes in 1919 which is at the core of the book so I find this story very moving because it's 2019 and we're remembering that period now and yesterday I was in Paris and Keynes was in Paris in May 1919 and it was in chaos there were riots workers on May day there was a huge workers strike and massive riots delegates to the Versailles treaty negotiations were walking over bodies but the whole of Europe was in a state of collapse it was really ghastly so he was there and he could see that Germany was in terrible straits and he could see what the French and British were doing and so on he drew up a plan it was a very simple plan and the plan was that Germany would raise a billion pounds or billion dollars or whatever it was then and the allied governments would guarantee that this is like me saying I promise to pay and my mum and dad are going to guarantee my promise right but this was so the allied United States, Britain and France and all those countries would guarantee that money and that would then give Germany a billion pounds to spend on recovery but also on reparations you know and then the bond he thought could become a form of money in itself really it could be exchanged could be used as a currency it's a brilliant idea and so he went and the British liked it I believe it or not the British Treasury thought it was a very good idea and so did Lloyd George and the French agreed he took it to President Wilson, the President of the United States and he said look there's this plan we could help Germany and he got a letter back from Wilson and the letter said no no no I really think that it's much better that financing for Germany should go through the usual private channels not through public channels and what a wonderful historian called Eric Roachway has uncovered is that the writer of the letter was at the time a partner of J.P. Morgan his name was Thomas LeMont he was saying no the bankers will give money to Germany not and we don't want governments to guarantee Germany's credit card and that's what happened so we're back to where the bankers decided whether or not Germany should recover or at least at what price and at what cost and we know what happened we had ongoing financial crisis we had the general strike in 26 we had the huge crash in 29 we had devastation between 1919 and 1933 when Roosevelt comes to power so for me this is a really powerful story because it's the story of how Keynes tried to develop a voluntary system backed by public authority and instead we had one backed by private authority and when Wall Street in the city of London are in charge you get the kind of chaos we suffered and then the devastating Second World War and so what happens then is we get Bretton Woods with first of all and the key story about Roosevelt is that A. he transforms the financial the international financial system and B. he dresses a major ecological crisis which is the dust bowl right there he sets up the civilian corps it's called and hires millions of people and they plant trees all across the southern states and they try to restore the soil so there's a great ecological now it's nothing on the scale of what we're facing today because what happens is by dismantling the international financial system as it was the gold standard he regained power for the state so he was then able to he together with the treasury was able to manage the value of the currency which helped the farmers but then they were able to manage the rate of interest and so on and so forth and then they could also begin to spend they could use fiscal policy to invest in creating jobs without having wall streets say no we're going to we're going to take our money out of here straight away and we're going to punish you for doing that so you know there is a real lesson in the new deal and I think we should be learning it for what we need to do so it's not simple you know but try to put that into 700 words in the garden it's really tough well what I want to do is take a risk and go back to the credit card analogy now I've thought about what it could be like to have a credit card yeah so so is it the case so you're saying the state at the moment is like a customer with a credit or just an individual with a credit card but the credit but obviously a credit card has to be you know you can only purchase something in a shop with a credit card because there is a private bank which transfers that money to the shop you owe the bank you don't owe the shop right yes but the point is you can only spend the money in the shop because the credit card says my name is Ann Pettiford because you've got decent credit rating you use the debit card when you pay for your coffee you're just showing a card to the shop and the card says you can trust this guy to pay five pounds four cup of coffee and a croissant in a London shop right so all of these things are saying and so and you are paying at the end of the month you're putting your salary your wage into the bank and then the bank will pay the shop yeah so the bank acts as the go-between yeah right okay but you want the go-between to be the state instead of private banks I want to say this the whereas I've only got my income behind my credit card the state has got 30 million taxpayers that's me and you right and you know the good thing about that is we pay our taxes every month we pay our taxes especially if we are on PAYE you know small people of course the big guys don't necessarily pay but there are 30 million regular taxpayers in Britain and we have a system of tax collection which is totally sound so whereas you may not be able to get a credit card the government can because it's got 30 and that's the other thing I want to stress is that taxpayers have enormous leverage over the system you know they depend on us they depend on us for making all of this possible not just the government but also the financial sector because what they love about about government investing in governments is that they're backed by 30 million taxpayers so yes so when the government wants to spend it has this potential source of income to pay for its spending and that makes it you know very very attractive but then it may also draw on people's existing savings like pension funds and so on it may draw on those and it can do both that. Yeah I mean I slightly disagree on the tax system being functional the tax system is very dysfunctional in many respects because a lot of there's a huge amount of avoidance and I think it's a very unfair system but the broader point that government can borrow because it's backed by the state is able to collect from a large number of people who pay tax absolutely correct I think there's a real tension for the left when it comes to the Green New Deal and confronting the climate crisis because on the one hand I feel like we know that there's a crisis that you need a radical response to the scale of the challenge at the same time I'm also just quite aware that what is required is maybe not as great as people sometimes imagine so if you look at the best estimates they say that we need to mobilize about a trillion dollars each year over the next decade in order to confront the climate crisis is set out by the IPCC if you take the global stock of capital the global stock of capital is 300 trillion dollars so what we're saying is each year we've got to be able to find 0.3% of the global stock of capital in order to save the planet and stop us and our and future generations from living in a completely destroyed world and the cost of doing that is 0.3% of the wealth that we already have so I suppose I find that sort of quite attention because it seems to me that if we chose collectively to confront the climate crisis it's perfectly doable and actually to me that kind of makes the case for a Green New Deal even stronger because it shows it really can be done and actually in the big scheme of things you know when the question is how can you save the entirety of humanity and the whole planet 0.3% of the global stock of capital every year being put to that cause doesn't feel like too much or too difficult and we should just sort of get on with it and I very much agree with you Ann that that isn't going to happen through private action it simply isn't it's only ever going to happen through collective action through democratic public action and so the real question is how do we get on with it because the stakes are so high and it's actually very doable at the same time so Tom you know there's 370 trillion dollars of financial assets out there and not sure how much of it is capital how much of it is just you know dodgy assets really but there's that but there's only 30 trillion dollars of global income GDP and that's the real stuff really the financial assets which are speculative assets are something but the point about those assets is they're all privately owned you know they're all owned by big organized asset management funds like BlackRock and my problem is that they want to be in the stratosphere and operate beyond regulatory democracy in order to call the shots when government wants the money so you say oh well it's only 0.3% but I can assure you that for some people that's big potatoes you know for some companies and but the thing about this is not is how does government get access to that now I would worry very much about having to go to BlackRock with a collection tin and say please will you help us pay for this because they'll say sure we've got loads of money we don't know what to do with it but this is our price and the price is the rate of interest really and the rate of interest and for me this is so important the rate of interest is what BlackRock wants to get as a return on that that lending and they will bleed us dry so if you look at what happened to British Steel recently British Steel suddenly was bankrupted it had been lent money by a private equity firm and only after it collapsed did we learn the private equity firm had demanded 9% on those loans no company in the world can make returns of 9% a year and enough money a profit and then enough money to pay back but having said that there's also an ecological question because if the rate of interest is that high is high then you've got to extract assets from the real world to pay for those $300 trillion that means you've got to strip your forest you've got to fish your seas you've got to clear up your land your labourers people have to work 24 hours a day in order to earn the returns the private sector is different so that's why I don't want to go near there I want us to be in charge of the price of the money that we're going to borrow I don't think for a moment I'm suggesting that otherwise I think we're just in vehement agreement my point is that I don't think it's such a big ask I think a trillion a trillion dollars of public money to save the planet actually within the context it sounds like a lot of money but actually given the stakes are so high even if it's a trillion dollars as a proportion of GDP at 30 trillion dollars that's still 3% you know and when the stakes are the future of humanity survival on this planet we should be able to do and I suppose what I'm saying is that sometimes the way that we talk about Green New Deal makes it sound impossibly utopian because it's such a big demand my point is that at some level it's worth understanding this isn't actually a huge or unreasonable demand it's a very reasonable demand and therefore I'm trying to use that as an argument to say and therefore we really need to get on with it and we shouldn't let anyone stand in our way because actually it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do but in order for anybody not to stand in our way we need to manage our financial system we can't leave it at the moment it's a narkic and it's the invisible hand we need a visible hand on the financial system so I think potentially the implicit disagreement or maybe you don't disagree but I think the tension here and potentially the one I'm not sure about is there's two ways of looking at the Green New Deal you don't need to change that much on a systemic level because it already is quite cheap for the government to borrow it already is quite possible for the government to borrow on international capital markets which are privately run and invest it in the infrastructure we need for a Green New Deal and then ultimately pay it back with the growth which emerges through that investment and what you're saying is that so long as we are borrowing that money off private capital markets we'll have to pay back a level of interest which means we have to try and achieve unsustainable and so therefore what we have to do is completely redesign the financial system for a Green New Deal to work exactly I want the government to be in the driving seat of the financial system not Wall Street and not the city of London and because our monetary system is a public good it's as if you've got a sanitation system and you've given it to a plumber who lives out in the remote atmosphere and you go and call on him and you say oh yeah I'm going to turn up but this is my price okay I want us to manage our own public good in the interest of and for me the big problem is really not the money there is just absolutely what Tom says it's not an issue the really big problem is what are we going to spend it on you know we don't have any plans now exactly that's exactly our big problem is that we don't know what we're going to spend it on and how do we take down the oil companies right now I think we should be thinking very seriously about that I think we're going to have to compensate to an extent Merkel just closed down nuclear power stations and I don't know I can't I had a number for how much it cost but the German government found the money and they just closed down nuclear power stations over night right they've now announced they announced only last week they were going to close down their coal power stations they're just going to close them down now that's going to cost money because a there are people's jobs involved and be there a shareholder they're going to say oh I want to be compensated we're going to handle about that it's going to cost money the question is how are we going to do when are we going to get started you know when are we going to get someone to write out the deals and to sort it for us and then but one of my colleagues on the Green New Deal Group Colin Hines has got a wonderful idea he's calling it the 3030 idea which is there are 30 million homes in Britain that are leaking energy are cold and wasteful and cost poor people especially a lot of money in heating bills and he is proposing that we should retrofit 30 million homes by 2030 now the thing about that project is it's entirely on the ground here doable we might have to train plumbers because we've very consciously untrained plumbers we don't have enough plumbers we don't have enough architects we don't have enough of the skills the engineers that we need and people who are engineers somewhere else will need to become to be able to learn how to re-engineer a house and make it more energy efficient but that is a that is something we can do quite quickly we can do to 30 million houses so we're saying look do this by 2030 so there are that is the big problem we have with the Green New Deal what on earth are we going to spend it on and the reason why that matters and I just you know the problem with saying oh the government can borrow the answer to it the real big answer is what is the government going to do to generate the income to balance the government's books because me I don't I don't believe in massive deficits either you know I'm not a deficit finance I think that's crazy because when you have a massive deficit when you have huge debts it's because the whole system is out of balance and it's out of balance because the private finance sector is anarchic about it and it's caused chaos crisis no no no we want to stabilize the system and the best way to do that create jobs employment and what does employment do for everybody it generates income at the end of the month we get a salary and guess what we pay taxes ok I got Tom's point we don't all pay taxes it doesn't work entirely well but the government gets tax revenues to repay the break so for me that we've got to think about the economy in that sort of circular way not just about one end of it which is what the Tories want us to do or you're going to borrow not just that no we're going to invest that's going to create jobs the jobs is going to generate income and the income is going to be used to repay the borrow and that's how we're going to balance the public finances you know Keynes said something wonderful on the radio actually once he said someone he was arguing with a banker actually about about austerity in those days and he said you know you can't balance the budget by cutting the nation's income like you couldn't balance your budget by cutting your income what we've done in the last 10 years is to cut the nation's income what Europe has done is to cut the nation's income so now it has huge debts and huge imbalances and the Germans are up in arms because there's debt debt debt and they're all worried about it but they're carrying on with austerity which is cutting the nation's income so that's so I want to think about the system as a system it's as if you're thinking about a car and all you're thinking about is the petrol you know and putting the petrol into the car but you're not thinking about everything that makes the car work and drive and blow and keep going and and the monetary system is like that so I suppose I just want to clarify what's different about or what in practice a publicly controlled or publicly owned monetary system looks like because when you were just talking about austerity there initially like an argument I'm much more familiar with which is the idea that when you're in a sort of economic stagnation you need to borrow to invest and then it's only then that you can make the tax income you can generate the income but you but that's sort of how the Labour Party would currently talk about it or that's quite conventional economics isn't it whereas what you want to do is not borrow from international capital markets to do that which is how I think the Labour Party at the moment is proposing doing it you want a publicly controlled monetary system I suppose what does that look like concretely that looks like the government of Britain my government has a central bank called the Bank of England it issues a currency called sterling I borrow in sterling and my central bank makes that happen because my central bank and the commercial banks make money available for all of us as an individual I go to a bank to get money the government can go to the central bank to get money now I'm not a person believes that the central bank must finance the government directly and the reason I don't support that is that I've worked in Nigeria and in Africa and I've seen what happens when you give politicians the power to manage the central bank so I believe in the government saying oh please I promise to pay can I have a bond I promise to pay that this is my bond I need you know three billion pounds for this investment and put it out there in public transparent so we can all see the departments are asking we can see what's going on and the bank of England can then intervene and buy those bonds and help to affect their price right so I mean we propose a similar scheme of money financing but as a response to any future recession because there's no ability to cut interest rates and so on but I do think right now we also have to acknowledge that interest rates are ultra low so the government can currently borrow 1.7% so I think what you're talking about is absolutely true if you get into a position where you can't borrow a sustainable rate but right now you know borrowing is very cheap partly because there is a glut of money chasing investment opportunities one of the outcomes of austerity is that it's just sucked demand out of the global economy and there's a huge level of instability with all these savings sloshing around with nowhere to go and that's actually why you can borrow for 1.7% and I think on the Commission on Economic Justice we said as a fallback you know in a future recession you would need stimulus spending and you could do that through money financing which I think we would both agree on I don't think you necessarily need to go for money financing right at the beginning when you can currently borrow at 1.7% but you can only borrow 1.7% because the bank of England has bought 50 billion pounds worth of government bonds the bank of England has effectively financed the deficit over the last 10 years yeah it's also bought a few of those but it is sitting on 450 billion pounds of government bonds so the rate of interest is low mainly because of the central bank's intervention but my problem isn't and yes so you can also borrow from the private markets in fact the private markets are paying the government at the moment to lend to the government they want to park their money in a safe place nothing is safe out there in the great but having said that you know when you're obligated to foreign lenders in a foreign currency dollars you're exposing your economy to currency risk if you only borrow in sterling that's a different story well we don't we also borrow in foreign currencies Japan for example all of Japan's borrowing is in its own currency so even though Japan has high levels of public debt it doesn't have a problem plus it has such high strong balance of payments position that it can always finance that borrowing so it's got 130% of GDP in Japan but it doesn't finance it from its external earnings its earnings from abroad it only finances it essentially because it's all domestic so I mean but the key point I'm making is that we should be borrowing from our own bank and not from foreign currencies and not necessarily from the private sector there's good news at the moment but the reason why interest rates are really low at the moment Tom is because the economy is still in colour we are still in we haven't recovered from the global financial crisis so borrowing is completely irrational I mean at the time when you could when you could borrow to invest infrastructure and all these different things over a long period of time you could do incredibly cheaply its total madness to refuse to do that and part of the problem we have is that most of the institutions were set up believing that government would have a deficit bias and therefore politicians would basically want to overspend when they couldn't really afford it and what's been so perverse in the last period is there's been a surplus bias of systematically trying to under spend when you would expect that politicians would try to overspend and our institutions can't cope with a situation where politicians are irrationally trying to under spend It's not irrational Tom, it's not irrational it's ideological No but I'll tell you what's ideological I say it's irrational because it is a crazy way to do things I mean it's clearly an ideological programme but I think it's a mad ideological so the programme is massive monetary expansion and coupled with Fiscal contraction Now those two are fighting each other Yeah we call it the tug of war in macroeconomic policy It makes no sense but it's a very destructive war it's the thing that is forcing but it's destructive also because it's the major cause of inequality So if you've got access to QE and all of that and your own assets you're the one percent the levels of inequality are obscene absolutely obscene and that's because of this imbalance in monetary Sorry Michael but I just want to get away from us just talk about the borrowing I want to talk about the spending and the income generated by employment in particular which is why I think the Labour Party should go for this because this is a jobs rich strategy and I have to retrain and upskill and up train and upskill and do all kinds of things to generate do the things we need to do to transform our economy very quickly and to generate income and employment And the best thing is that you do them at home So whether it's insulating homes or decarbonising the heat system these aren't things that you can outsource to the other side of the world It's exactly, it's stuff that creates good, well-paying, decent skilled jobs right here at home which I think is really compelling for any political party as an officer of the public actually we're going to create hundreds of thousands millions of really decent skilled jobs for a really good social purpose and you know what we're going to be creating these jobs for is to make your home warmer, more efficient, greener I mean that is a fantastic story But I don't want to get too excited about this because we can't do any of it until we have this fight with the private finance sector, with the city of London when it, we don't even know that we have to have the struggle you know when we talk about struggle in the labour movement we do not talk about as engaging at that level we have to have that struggle we have to regain public authority over our economy, that is a big ugly fight because those guys are powerful and rich, they have a load of money they have a load of leverage over us and it's a big fight and we have to be ready to fight that battle That was the end of the the post war settlement basically said markets will exist to serve people and what's happened with the neoliberal settlements it says that people are there to serve markets and turning that back around to the way it should be putting the economy under democratic control is the first step to solving any of these collective action problems that's the mission critical step I think for the left I'm going to start taking questions from the audience if you've got questions put them in now, put them with the emoji rocket which means I am more likely to see them whilst they're coming in I want to ask about one more element of your book and your ideas which I think differ from what would be mainstream green new deal of the variety that the labour party is most likely to adopt which is that I think the language of the labour party and the mainstream language of the green new deal is about green growth so it's about the idea that you can borrow money or however you finance it you create more jobs higher incomes whilst decoupling growth from carbon emissions what you want is something quite different which is a steady state economy you want us to abandon growth as a goal absolutely I think and I know that growth is a neoliberal term I mean it was sort of reinvented in the 1960s by the OECD and the point of it was at a time when Britain was at full employment you know we were at full capacity what we couldn't do was to compete with the finance sector which through speculation you know when you're gambling you want to gamble on winning the lottery you can make a million bucks but day to day work is just you know full employment was just generating the right amount of income if you like they wanted to raise that to compete with the finance sector so they said this extraordinary target for the British economy that it had to grow by I don't know 50% within 10 years it was insane and it led to inflation it led to massive instability and it was also part of the deregulation liberalization process and the terrible thing about it all is that A. Keynes was blamed and secondly the Labour movement was blamed you know and what annoys me is that economists like Kalecki and lots of other people on the left support him argue that the Labour movement got too powerful and it's their fault that wages rose and it's their fault that we had inflation and I lived through that era it's very real to me and I remember being so flummoxed by those arguments and I'm now very clear the Labour movement was responding to rising prices but prices were rising because credit had been deregulated and we'd opened the spigot if you like of credit and poured it out and you know it was too much money chasing too few goods and services and we got inflation and we blamed Labour for that and Labour blames itself that's what's so extraordinary I sound quite interesting in the new era of sort of globalization so sorry I was just saying I'm against growth I mean I think it's very yeah just because you have these global product markets in particular where so sort of demand pull inflation is actually relatively hard in an economy that isn't principally domestic in the sense that traditional form of inflation too much demand chasing too few goods and services pushing prices up I just don't think you see that as a phenomenon in the UK today what we're much more exposed to what really much more exposed to is of course exchange rate movements and the big determinant of inflation is now cost push which is depending on exchange rates and that's something that's so much more out of our control as we've seen in the past 18 months the big movements and the exchange rate as a result of the Brexit process does give you a sense of that feeling of being out of control because it's now subject to these kind of global markets that actually you can't influence and that's why that's why Roosevelt wanted to get rid of the gold standard and get rid of Wall Street being in the driving and he wanted to manage the currency now the neoliberals are dead against managing the currency but you're absolutely right that's where we're importing inflation secondly because we buy our green beans from Kenya instead of growing them ourselves and another important theme of my book is that we're going to have to learn to be more self-sufficient really we're going to have to learn to be because we're not going to be able to fly goods around the world we're not going to be able to import we're not going to be able to have all those goodies you know much as I love my iPhone this is not going to be the future we have to really think about that a because we're not going to be able to access the finite minerals the rare earths that go into the phone but be because this form of crazy chaotic external international trade unbalanced delivered by the invisible hand and resulting in currency fluctuations which they love of course they love the volatility of it that's how you make a quick buck is gambling on that volatility when 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window less than 5% of the US economy was internationally traded absolutely remarkable the degree to which you just didn't have such enormous scale and you also had a system which essentially meant that as the US generated surpluses it redistributed those to other parts of the world and now we've created a system that doesn't have any of those rules in play and has become so much more internationally traded whilst also not having any of the redistribution of surplus I keep upsetting my European friends by pointing out that actually the biggest problem to the EU is not in fact Brexit it's Germany and running these enormous surpluses that are sucking massive amounts of demand out of the European economy I hate calling it the closing the gold window the United States defaulted on its obligations to repay its debts in gold it was a default it was the biggest sovereign defaulted history at the time and that's precisely when they defaulted was because of the Vietnam War so by not being able to generate foreign income to pay for a foreign war the United States got itself into difficulties and he thought the only way he could change that was by defaulting on the gold standard on the Bretton Woods system which was basically so to me that date is the day that you can sort of trace the new neoliberal order beginning to emerge it's quite interesting that it says at a specific moment that was that that's the moment in time and I think 10 years off the financial crisis now is the moment for the left to say actually that whole period is over and now we're going to build and design a new economic settlement that's fit for the 2020s and beyond but we've got to have the courage to say well if they were prepared to create a world in that way to create an entirely new economic settlement then by the way we can do the same an entirely new settlement now and now is exactly the right time time to do it and different people are making contributions but having said that we need international collaboration to do that and brexiting and wrenching ourselves away from our allies is just the wrong thing to do when A we need to collaborate around the climate and B we need to collaborate around this project so I absolutely agree with that but I also have always been very resistant to the idea of attributing all of our problems to sort of abstract globalisation like yes we need to we absolutely need a new international system and a new way of doing things but we also need to take real responsibility for the decisions made here at home and to my mind you know the most malevolent institution in the country is the Treasury for example and actually we need to confront that concentration of power and a very rigid sort of ideological way of thinking if we're going to create this new economy but I think it's both and it's recognising that a lot of the decisions are under our own control here at home but also a lot are international and you've got to do both yeah and I we need to do some questions and we're going to do them quickfire because it's getting quite late so I mean some of them are quite difficult to do quickfire but as much as possible right Daston what role if any does a jobs guarantee policy have in the Green New Deal and in fighting the finance sector in what and what role if any does a jobs guarantee have in the Green New Deal for a central one presumably and in fighting the finance sector what's the relationship between the two so first of all I'm against the jobs guarantee because I don't think you can do that I think it would take the most extraordinary administered bureaucracy and you would actually be having to match people to jobs and can you imagine who's going to do that I'm really worried about that so what we talked about was the creation of a carbon army strongly in favour of full employment but the idea that we're going to have a bureaucratic system that is going to get every person on turn up and say you're going to do this job or I found this job for you and you're going to do that it's for me it's a variation on work fare so I'm slightly I am very worried about it actually but the Green New Deal talks about a carbon army and how does that link to the finance sector well what it does is it you know creating so what the neoliberal project is about eliminating employment if you look at what Silicon Valley are doing they would they hoping to build robots so that in future they don't have to pay workers and they're preparing I mean I had to stay in a hotel the other day where there was no receptionist and I had to go up to a machine and punch in a number to get to my bedroom and it you know this wasn't this I was so upset by this but this whole you go to the airports and there are no human bodies there are no workers and no people so the drive the capitalist drive is actually to strip workers up and they pay out of the system and I think we very much have to bring them back in again and and I think that finance will be again that because robotification of the economy automation automation all of that stuff is much cheaper and much better that's why Silicon Valley that's why all those tech entrepreneurs where those big platforms are so keen on delivery and Uber and all of that for you know sort of getting rid of proper jobs where do you stand on the carbon army versus fully automated luxury communism where you sort of move to a world that's a bit post work well just can I come in briefly on the jobs the jobs guarantee I think if you just look at the UK economy we have historically very low rates of unemployment but the problem that we have is that a lot of that employment is very very poor so it's precarious work that's very badly paid 58% of households living in poverty or households that are in work and actually what we need is higher wages and better quality jobs and the best guarantee for good jobs and decent wages to trade unions and rebalancing the power between labour and capital so I think a jobs guarantee to me is a bit of a distraction from the central point which is that capital has become too powerful labour has become too weak that results in poor quality jobs that are insecure and poorly paid and the way that you resolve that is to increase the power of labour by having more trade unions and stronger worker rights rather than a kind of government run administratively complex jobs guarantee that somehow is to me at least skirting around that core issue of who has power in the economy this is a good one you might disagree on this one as well Almas Koch I hope I've pronounced that correctly is it naive to think climate change can be mitigated without a substantial reduction in living standards in the global north first of all we should stop using the term climate change it's climate breakdown you know George Mombio schooled us in that and he's absolutely right and will it lead to lower living will it necessarily lead to lower living standards in the global north no I don't think so I mean I think it will lead to greater well-being and certainly greater senses of community and of collective action you know it's a it's going to be I think a little bit like the people that lived through the war and survived the people who stayed at home you know they had rationing they you know big grand houses were occupied and turned into hospitals you know it was a real upheaval to secure the future of the nation and we're doing something again and in real terms probably their incomes must have fallen I don't actually they didn't did they Tom I'm not really sure about that but the fact of the matter is that we came out of the war better off and with a much greater sense of collective action and community that's why we got the NHS that's why you got public housing public education system and so on and so forth it all came out of that building of solidarity during the war and it was building of solidarity within constraints there was rationing there was food rationing there was quite a lot of that stuff but the most interesting thing is how healthy people were as a result of that changed lifestyle and I think it's going to be a bit like that we're not going to be as isolated from each other as alienated as so obsessed with shopping we're not going to be able to do that we're just fashion is not going to be the big thing it is at the moment I'm afraid but we're going to feel much better and we're going to have a much more sense of meaning in life in my view but above all we're going to save the life support system the earth which keeps us alive really it's quite materially austere in a way isn't it you're consuming less you're consuming a lot less well the question is who is consuming a lot less so I think we got it we got to really care for this because actually the consumption is really is really concentrated by different income groups so actually a lot of people's living standards could really improve now you could say well on the one hand you could describe a future where people don't have cars and say well that means lower living standards but actually if that future is that you've got universal cheap clean green public transport where you can get around the air quality isn't killing kids or killing older people rather than giving kids asthma you know I'd say our living standards could really improve if we clean up our economy but yes for some people their definition of living standards may be reduced so if you enjoy the comfort of a private jet you know you're probably not going to be able to do that in the future I don't think that's an impairment to people's living standards so actually I think with greening the economy can be a route to better quality lives for the vast majority of people and yes for a small segment of society that over consumes it will mean a change in their lives but that's a good thing for us all collectively so back to that example fewer cars on the road I think actually will be better for us all is it technically less consumption well I guess it technically might be but it's certainly a much better quality of life to be able to breathe clean air and get on cheap public transport and the other really important thing is that 10% of the population are responsible for 50% of emissions that's what I mean that's exactly what I'm getting at so affecting their pattern of life I don't think that is it's fair to say that well because that 10% having to change the way that they live that somehow living standards have fallen well actually for the great majority of people they could actually have a much better life with a more secure job with a warmer home with cleaner air to breathe that to me is not a decline in living standards we have to face some facts though Tom you know the fashion industry is a massively carbon intensive industry got real bugbear with the fashion industry I really have and I I mean just look at all the clothes that are being discarded it's extraordinary what we're doing with clothing now people are buying things wearing them once throwing them away you know we're in this throw away culture which is it all ending up on landfill we don't know where to put all that stuff now how to recycle it that's the key thing we don't understand the thermodynamics of this the stuff doesn't disappear it just turns into something else it turns into something to you know it is chemically transformed but it's still there and now we're just building up these piles and piles of clothes which we've hardly worn that has to change you know it's got to change qualitatively I think we should wrap it up there it's getting quite late I want another beer you've been brilliant thank you for your comments thank you for your questions thank you Tom Kobassie thank you Ann Pettifor thank you Michael Walker get Ann Pettifor's book the case for a Green New Deal we will be talking about the Green New Deal again on Saturday at 8pm at the world transformed for 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