TRASHFUTURE - Against Calculator Santa feat. James Meadway

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

It’s a bit of a smart episode (a dangerous idea). Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) speak with economist and returning guest James Meadway (@meadwaj) about the logic of socialist government in Britain versus the logic of Blairite neoliberalism. Did you know there’s a Cornish fishing village trying to crowdfund getting a GP? Did you know that Phillip Hammond denies that people in Britain live in poverty? We discuss all of this and more. If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* On June 15, we’ll perform at Wolfson College Bar (Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB) in Cambridge. The show starts at 8:30 pm, so be there and be ready to hear about Gundams. Tickets are £8 for students and £10 for general admission: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-in-cambridge-15062019/ *COMEDY KLAXON*: Come to Milo’s regular comedy night on June 13 at The Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA), This show also starts at 8 pm and features Milo himself and Ben Pope, with previews of their Edinburgh shows. Tickets are £5—sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/edinburgh-previews-ben-pope-and-milo-edwards-tickets-63000380835 If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Before we get into the main content of this week's program, the TrashFuture Rationality Correspondent has actually come back into the studio again for the second week running and wants to share some of his thoughts. The chattering classes of this once great nation are once again up in arms, posting all over the well-known website Twitter.com about the new big thing. No, not the latest pop starlet to be seen out in public, not the peculiar shape of my head, not even the latest goings-on on ITV's Island of Love. No, I speak, of course, of the visit of Donald Trump. Now, I'm no fan of Donald Trump, I disagree with many of his views, but I also, as a Democrat

and a Liberal, believe we ought to give him a fair hearing, unlike mad animal farm socialist Jeremy Corbyn. But members of the loony hard left, such as many Liberal Democrat voters, have been decrying his visit to the UK, saying that we shouldn't be rolling out the red carpet for the US President simply for the trifling reason that he has abhorrent views and policies which we oppose. They are also in sense that he called the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan a loser, but have they asked themselves, what if he is a loser? Wouldn't the President of the US probably be able to tell? Wouldn't the father of Eric Trump know one when he saw one? In many ways, as per usual, the real loser here is freedom of speech. If we do not allow Donald

Trump, the US President, a platform in the UK to express his views, is that not in itself the kind of fascism the left so hostily oppose? Should we not seek to give a voice to the voiceless? People claim that Trump can't be allowed a state visit because his regime locked children in cages, but look, we've all had a few drinks and done things we regret, and this is a double standard, we still allow the Austrian President to visit. The protests against Trump were nothing more than snobbery. The high and mighty lefties of Islington and Tower Hamlets can't handle the real, sort-of-the-earth working-class appeal of a man like Donald J. Trump. Because what do the working-class love? McDonalds? Check. Fake tan? Check. Sexism? Bingo. Gold lifts? Of course.

Sexy daughters with weird husbands, whom among us has not indulged. The most ridiculous suggestion of all, though, was to suggest that the Queen was not enjoying the company of Donald Trump. Her Majesty would never show distaste for an honoured guest, especially not a barely intelligible aging sex pest with golden-crusted accessories. This could be describing any one of her own relatives. In short, by failing to recognise a man who started out in life with only a plucket attitude and $200 million to his name, the British metropolitan elites have once again done themselves a disservice. Donald Trump is a modern man. He doesn't want to dwell on boring

stuff like the past, the facts, or even finishing his own sentences. He is a man of action. It's disgraceful that the parasitic Ramonas prevented all the Trump fans from lining the streets to meet him, with only less than a hundred making it through their Stalinist picket lines to greet the special boy. In many ways, it would have been more fitting to let a few more people through. And if Trump could have been greeted not by a hundred people, but by a crowd of 1984. Thank you again, Brendan. I don't know what our show would be without your stern but firm guidance, keeping us on the straight and narrow and making sure that we never accidentally oppress anyone's

speech or like infringe on their ability to put on a right-wing comedy night where they make coffee-flavoured coffee jokes. Ah, yes. Look, guys, the thing is the struggle we're putting on any comedy night is that you struggle not to talk about the fact that there are too many damn genders, you know? It's the elephant in the room. Yeah. So, welcome back to TF. I'm Riley. You remember me from all the stuff. I'm here, of course, with Milo, who gets to sit at the gold microphone today. It's me, you boy. I have too many damn genders. Nate on the boards.

Hello, it's me. I don't have the golden mic, but it'll sound the exact same for some reason, almost as if it's just decorative coding. I don't. I want the gold mic for future recordings. I want people to know how cool I am. What you're basically saying is you are the Donald Trump of podcasting. Fine. If I get a gold mic, sure. Our studio has a gold lift. More things need to be made. Look, everyone needs to really get on putting money in the Patreon because we need more gold stuff.

Like, we will like bedazzle the trash future studio at the Patreon level. Okay. Can we make it a note here to please put in a new Patreon tier that we will begin bedazzling the studio? King Midas X Justice X Trash Future. Yes, King Midas. Yes, exactly. Thank you. We will replace Riley's balls with actual rubies, thereby preventing the birth of many unfortunate children. Awesome. Cool. I'm for it.

And also, we are joined by returning champion, James Medway. Hello, hello. Back in the basement again. I couldn't find your lift, golden or otherwise, in the way down here. The lift goes from the studio directly down to hell. Look, so it's been another big week in Britain. Much hay has been made of change UK, changing into not a party anymore. It's been a real hoo-ha. Yeah. They've put on the Portis Head album.

They're trying to get people to leave. The party's over, folks. What's really, I don't want to spend too long on them because they were a fundamentally unimportant group of arrogant grandstanders. But what really strikes me about change UK is not just that they had no policies, which they listened to our episode with Molly, they didn't, or that they were utterly in inept at campaigning. It's that they completely forgot what a political party was and just decided that they were a bunch of media brands and a group of different media brands apparently don't play well together. I don't think it was even that. I mean, if you look at their actual branding,

it was so sort of woeful. What was it? Four lines, four black lines with change UK written in bold aerial next to it as their logo, that sort of thing. It's like if this was their effort at branding, they failed on that part. But the policy thing was interesting. It's not particularly interesting because there's nothing there, but it's striking how little there is there. These people dance around and say, oh, God, we could do all of this better if only Jeremy Corbyn and everybody else get out of the way. We could make this whole thing work because we've got all the bright ideas. And then you go and ask them and there's absolutely nothing there. If anybody struggled through Chris Leslie's

magnum opus from last summer on what we should do if we were a sensible party really, there's nothing there. It's completely vapid. And it's really striking that for all the endless talk about how much we must have a centre, how much this is completely necessary for Britain now, they don't actually have anything to fill in with it. Chris, the first 500 words are just saying that Jeremy Corbyn is a nasty man. And then the last thousand words are just screw Flanders over and over again. Well, it's the... I think we'll touch back on this later. It's very clearly, is that Change UK was a nostalgia party. They were just nostalgic for the early 2000s and 1990s. I mean, Mario's Let Me Love You was a banger to be fair.

And their entire appeal was let's go... All of the problems that have stemmed from everything that we did in the 1980s and 90s, those weren't real. All we just have to pretend they don't exist and then we can go back to them. And that would be great. No, it's a denial of reality to it. The reality of the 90s and 2000s was basically most of the things that we see right now that are problems. And that's everything, like the aftermath of a massive financial crisis in the form of austerity. Climate change, the Kyoto Protocol is 1990, right? We already knew this was a problem for this entire time and basically did nothing, or next to nothing for that entire time. So all of the problems you get now were all there already.

So you can't kind of wish these things away. That was the dark underbelly of the 90s and 2000s. Well, in terms of continuing to have careers in politics, I'm sure that Chris Leslie, Ann Coffey, Joan Ryan, and the rest are wishing that they never split from their parties because they're going to have to get fakey consulting jobs the next couple of years. I mean, who knows? Considering that they were a party by, of, and for no one besides Polly Toynbee and Jonathan Friedland, maybe they can become guardian columnists. That's true. They can get... That's UBI for upper middle class people in this country is being a columnist. I can imagine that and it would be brilliant and it should happen.

Yes. All of Change UK, I don't care what they are now with the various continuity Change UKs and the others, all of them when they are unceremoniously booted from their seats because all Chris Leslie could basically offer was Chris Leslie and no promise to do or support or stand for anything other than Chris Leslie. Make him a columnist, please. I want to make fun of his writing on a weekly basis. Chris Leslie is more like Kanye West than we initially gave him credit for, actually. Yeah. And if you have the mindset of Kanye West, but no talent or discernible skill, then you become a centrist politician. Or Kanye West. We sort of need this to happen because it's like the human podcast centipede for content. It's like, if they do this, they write their

terrible columns. We can mock them and we don't have to work as hard writing the show notes. Exactly. That was unfair to Kanye West, but I will say that if Chris Leslie wants to get global level famous, the evidence bears out that he should get a wife with a bigger ass. So, Chris, if you're listening, maybe consider it. Also, so Change UK, a fundamentally unimportant event that accrued a lot of media coverage. Trump, as we mentioned, as Brendan reminded us, also visited a fundamentally unimportant event that received an enormous amount of media coverage. They all suck. They're as bad as one another. They all deserve to be unceremoniously removed from their positions of power and influence.

I also think, too, just as a really quick note that, like you said, they're both very unimportant events. But also, I think that you can watch the way in which there's universal consensus against the leadership of the Labour Party on the part of people who make this into a much bigger deal than it actually is. Donald Trump is wildly unpopular in the United Kingdom, and yet somehow Jeremy Corbyn is wrong for boycotting the state dinner. Change UK was apparently the death knell of the Labour Party, except it was basically a bag of shit that failed to light on fire. And as a result, like this entire time, you could at any moment have done like a pause and read what was in the news, and there would be some column just going wild

castigating the leadership of the Labour Party, because apparently they weren't reading the evidence correctly. They had lost the plot. And it's very obvious, like in two weeks, no one's going to give a shit about Donald Trump's state visit. But obviously, like there's still going to be 75, 80% of people in this country disapprove of Donald Trump. Of course. The thing is, Nate, we all know the real reason that Jeremy Corbyn boycotted that dinner was that they refused to serve his homemade jam. Yeah, he wanted to be there just necking glass after glass of wine. So you can say glass after glass of jam. But here's what I find very interesting. These two events have sort of received their

big media pops constantly. However, Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer, being interviewed recently, said that the UN report suggesting that 14 million British people lived in dire poverty and that essentially Britain was swiftly becoming a humanitarian emergency. His suggestion that that figure, he just doesn't, he just doesn't believe it. He dismissed the figure as depressing and therefore probably not true. When people tell me I still live at home with my parents, I say depressing and probably not true. Well, you live with who say now? No, I don't. I don't live anywhere. Actually, you want the real truth, guys. I don't live with my parents. Don't worry. I'm homeless. It's fine.

Yeah, Philip Hammond just said, nope. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand the idea that 14 million people here live in poverty. I just, I haven't seen the evidence of it, which is... Which is weird, right? I'm sorry. This is just absolutely bizarre. What bloody planet is he on? How can you walk around London? Like almost anywhere? He goes into Westminster. He goes into the houses of parliaments. He sees, he must see people who are homeless. He must get a vague glimmer that something perhaps somewhere is up. How can he, how can he say that there aren't at least a very large number of people who are in poverty? He can squabble about the number up or down. It's simply denied that there's millions of people in dire poverty when you have a completely

reputable source telling you this. And by the way, PS, you're the Chancellor of the Exchequer, supposed to pay some attention to, like, actually official figures and all the rest of it. It's quite incredible. That's added up, by the way, today, this morning, where suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the Treasury's turned around and said, oh, we can't do anything about climate change. It will cost a trillion pounds. Think of the biggest number you can, and then they go, it's a trillion. Absolutely no evidence whatsoever about how they got to this number, what he even means, what is this cost? Is it money we have to spend? Is it money we're going to save? Is it money we'll kind of lose in some way? So they just... It's a kind of breakdown of what the

basic bits of government are supposed to do, which is like, if they have a number and it's supposed to be a real official number, you can't point to the ones that are real and official and say, that doesn't exist. And then on the other hand, just sort of make one up and then leak it to the financial times because you're trying to do over the Prime Minister before she leaves. Look, James, the thing is, you're splitting hairs here. Look, the point is, like, whether or not, you know, stopping climate change is going to cost a bit more than a trillion pounds, a bit less than a trillion pounds. The point is, it's very expensive and it would be much cheaper to let everyone fucking die. We're going to be the richest dead people who've ever lived and

then all died. Yeah, that's it. So we're all going to die because it's very expensive to fix climate change. And all of the things we could do, one of the biggest things we could do to fix climate change, of course, which is make some of these people in dire poverty not poor, actually won't work because apparently, no one in Britain is poor because everyone learned to code, I think. Well, if no one's Britain poor, we can probably afford a trillion pounds. You know what I mean? We just add it all up and do something about climate change. None of it makes any sense. None of it. None of it at all. So, thus, Philip Hammond, a spreadsheet fill in his new, you know, made up numbers factory. Sorry, that was quite a felt the pain and it's a reasonable

thing to feel the pain about this. It's a thing of the idea. It's beyond, it's kind of incomprehensible. On the one hand, though, there's no poverty in Britain. On the other hand, we can't spend anything in climate change because, as you say, it's simply too expensive. So, you know, it feels like when I look at the way that the Conservative Party works in this country, it feels like when a student turns in a paper and they've changed like a JPEG to a Word document and they sent it in because then they'll be able to claim that, hey, the actually the file got corrupted somehow. My bad. I still made the time, the deadline, but, you know, and then they have the entire weekend to work on it, but they haven't done that next step. They've just got the fucked up file that doesn't have,

you know, that isn't actually like the document is empty. The big dossier is empty. And so, they give these answers to an utterly supine right wing press who just sort of treats it like it's a serious and normal thing. And it's like, but all you do is scratch the surface in the most basic way to see how completely, like not even a bad answer it is. It's like it doesn't even answer a question because they just don't even acknowledge the question exists. It's like, I don't know how to describe it other than everything about their policy, everything about their approach to politics seems to be placeholder text on a website that hasn't gotten finished. Spreadsheet, Phil's spreadsheet was corrupted by the fact that he wasn't actually using a

computer. He was using one of those like VTech, the cow says move. I've made this joke before, but it's like the Kelly Rowland video where she's texting. And if you watch the video, she's not actually texting. She's typing into an Excel spreadsheet. And yet for some reason, she's expecting a text message and reply. Theresa May has never sent a text. She's only ever typed into an Excel spreadsheet. However. But how was expecting a text from Kelly Rowland? But what he got was Philip Hammond's plans for the UK economy. And Phil's just been winging it with all these messages from Kelly Rowland. And that's why none of it makes any sense. So what Philip Hammond says.

I just have information about hoes. I'm sorry. When confronted by Emily Maitlis, and to Emily Maitlis' credit, she does actually not just accept his answer and move on. Maybe that's because Philip Hammond is being completely outrageous. Well, I mean, if you can skewer an intellect like Dapperlofts, you can certainly get Philip Hammond. I mean, Dapperlofts can use a spreadsheet. So Philip Hammond says in response to the assertion that the UN found 14 million people living in dire poverty, he says, look around you. That is not what we see in this country. Look around the studio. Do you see any homeless people in this newsroom?

Well, we've established that there aren't any homeless people in this room. Yeah, exactly. Of course. I'm a survey of me and you. Are you homeless? No, I'm not homeless. Of course, there are still people struggling with the cost of living. Of course, this is the cost of living in a house. Of course, people are struggling with the cost of living. I understand that, but no one's in dire poverty. I think that's partly because

Philip Hammond's way of looking at the world doesn't accept that in a market economy, dire poverty can exist, except if the government is corrupt or if it's in Africa. So it's like you can show him scenes of dire poverty in his own home constituency and his only response is Google Venezuela. Yeah, essentially. He does. He is what? Must be one of the richest constituencies in the whole country. It's Rony Mead, isn't it? They represent. So perhaps if he's in Rony Mead, perhaps he walks out in the streets and paves with gold or whatever it is they do over there.

And he doesn't see actually very much homelessness. Maybe that's it. Maybe he shuts his eyes all the way to central London. The way to see, I think the way to see Philip Hammond is that he as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he's being an incredible constituency MP for Rony Mead. I like the idea of the dire poverty in Rony Mead. Well, there's been no industry here. So they've not signed a Magna Carter in Rony Mead, not since 1215. We're out of work. So it's the... And again, I wouldn't think that it's too surprising that this is happening. It's not surprising that the cost of everyone not dying due to climate change has been

pegged at the biggest number imaginable based on whatever the treasury felt like writing. And the UN Special Rapporteur on Dire Poverty's warning signs are being ignored because of ideology. We are never going to expect these people to really be telling the truth. That's fine. But it's just they seem to have stopped trying. Isn't also a trillion pounds basically Apple's valuation? Oh, the implication is the Apple good selling climate thing. I think they want it too. That's the thing. It's not even that big of a number. It's not like they're like, it's a hundred trillion pounds. It's a number. It's an amount of

money that exists. Yeah. I mean, they've probably in the last 20 years stashed more than that in the Cayman Islands. I mean, not just Britain, but throughout the developed world. Well, guys, hang on. Let's blue sky this. That's Matt Hancock for a moment. Okay. We can't afford to stop climate change. Everyone dies. That's bad. On the upside, everyone dies. No homelessness problem. Oh, that's good. That's how we're solving the dire problem. Exactly. That's yeah, that would work in a sense. Oh, you're cold and hungry. How about being neither of those things when the earth burns to a crisp? So the thing is, in the background of this basically breakdown of this slow breakdown

of society and the fact that the political class is unwilling or unable to do anything about it, either because they are nostalgic for the 1990s or because this is actively what they want. James and I have been having this conversation about how Corbinism is responding to that and what Corbinism has to do and be. So we were saying, for example, we know that Corbinism means attempting to reverse the drive of people into dire poverty. We know that it means to do that by appropriating and expending resources. But there is an actual element of the strategy that I think hasn't quite been worked out yet, right? When we were talking about this, we were talking about it in

terms of a model of change in agency and policy outcome. Yeah. I think that is what we were talking about. There's another part of it, I think, which relates to why is it that the chances of the extractor is either denying real numbers or making up fake numbers. I don't think it's necessarily deliberate all of this. It's just that they've given up. We're in this weird situation and the people in charge are just wandering around waiting for something to turn up. They'll rescue them out of this mess and nothing really will. Maybe they'll come up with Boris Johnson or God knows who else is as leader of the Conservative Party and maybe that'll sort things out or maybe you'll just

carry on doing this for a while. So at least part of the issue, I think, with what Corbinism is as like this is something that needs to be in government and it will make a difference, is it has to supply that sense of purpose. It has to supply a whole government here, which is now tootling around in little circles and has been for some time because Brexit has occupied every single waking moment, everything it can plausibly think about and bits of it can kind of keep falling off and like basic function of the state. And the Treasury is pretty much the most basic function of the state. It is the bit that taxes and spends. That's the kind of core part of what government does is kind of losing the plot in some senses,

right? So part of it is trying to get that sense of what does it mean to have a government where you actually have a sense of direction, a sense of purpose and all the rest of it. And I think a big part of the reason that we're here is partly it's because Brexit sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but I think the other part is that this model of logic, process, and agency that the Conservatives are basing their government on, that to be honest, Blair and Brown based their government on, that was initiated more or less by Thatcher, has nothing left to do. It has no room left to try and continue doing the thing that it does. And so what we're now going to do is we're going to go through what these models actually are from in the sense of how

do they conceive of the world, capital, how are these policies enacted and how are the outcomes delivered? There's not much left to privatise. There are a few things. There's the NHS, obviously, they really want that, but where's your imagination? There's loads of things you can privatise if you really put your mind to it. I mean, there's roads, there's schools, there's the police. You can really push the boundaries of this thing, but for some reason, they lack that imagination or intent to do this. But I think more seriously that you are running onto the basic issue of governance here, which is it's quite hard to get any further with no sense of direction. And if you look at the contenders of the Tory leadership contest,

they also offer bits of solutions or partial ideas, but because all of them are hung up on various forms of what breaks it is or is not, they can't really provide a particularly complete solution to it. Or they don't and they have to pretend to believe in it. I mean, that seems like that kind of thing. Matt Hancock for Tory leader, he's got an app, it's going to be fine. Yeah, he's got an app, he seems nice. Exactly. He doesn't seem nice. I hate to break this too, he doesn't seem that nice at all. He's a Conservative MP. There's a baseline where you think, okay, probably not that great. The Matt Hancock that exists in my imagination is a Labrador who has turned into a cabinet minister who has just fallen in with a bad crowd.

It's a sequel to Air Bud, a very dark sequel. We have this theory about Matt Hancock that he's like this beautiful special boy who's just been taken in by the bullies and he doesn't know what to do. And if we just took him to a safe place and gave him love and care, he could just eat waffles all day long and do the things that he was born to do. Do things like parkour, things that he loves. He could just enthusiastically experiment with new kinds of adventure sports. I think he would be very happy doing that. That's why he stands out so much from the other Tory leadership candidates, just because he seems capable of experiencing joy. Again, at a fourth grade level. Yeah, exactly. It's a very pure, innocent kind of joy. I mean,

you look at some of the other ones that you think probably they're into a bit of joy as well, but not quite so pure. No, no, no. Exactly. Everyone's going in hard for Rory Stewart, but I mean, he has all the personality for sort of haunted Pinocchio. I don't really understand how you can imagine having sex with Rory Stewart. He's just like literally holding his right hand out in front of him. And you're like, Rory, why are you doing that? But imagine, you know, taking a little other mix and match from the Tory leadership candidates. Imagine Matt Hancock smoking opium. Oh, well, now that would be exciting. That's something I'd do. I'd want to hear what Matt Hancock's opium dreams be. That's a group on I would buy,

smoke opium with Matt Hancock. You got an app. You can probably offer it through your app. Matt Hancock dark web app. Very fun. Matt Hancock MP dot onion dot tour. We've talked about this, like there's all this noise been made about the opening for left politics. We know what we want to accomplish with this opening, but there's this question of how who will deliver Corbinism? And we have this model who enacts it and how does that translate to policy? That is to say, we have a set of manifesto promises, but people come out not just for a set of policy outcomes, but outcomes for people. We elected the government and the government will do it. But I think there is this imagination that Jeremy Corbin when he's elected,

I think because so many people have put so much mental energy into just getting the Tories out of government and putting a Labour Left Party into government that I suspect when Jeremy Corbin can't just push a big red button that says socialism or flip the socialism switch from off to on and suddenly people's lives are better, that's going to be a very difficult like month after he's elected. And so I wanted to talk about how this actually works, but I think we need to counterfactual first. And I think we can take Blairism as our counterfactual because even if it is a fraudulent version of progressive politics, it's the only one most of our listeners have ever actually experienced.

So we're looking at their mental model of how the world works, their agency model of how you then translate that world into the policy outcomes you want and what outcomes you get. So James, how can we describe that mental model? Well, I mean, the mental model behind Blairism, I suppose, is that it's slightly different to how it actually ended up in office. I mean, the mental model is roughly that we have globalization. This means that all the sort of old school social democratic demands in particular demands are left. Like, you know, let's have nationalization, public ownership, high taxes for the rich, all that sort of stuff has to disappear. We can't do any of these things

because globalization is the rather sort of foreshortened version of it. The other bit is, you know, the working class has disappeared, everyone's middle class now, the 60, 40, whatever the numbers are, the division of society, the basic people are okay, and then 20 percent you aren't, you know, that kind of thing. So that's the kind of world that they think they inhabit. And there's also that peculiar bit of all the way through the 90s up until getting elected, they would talk incessantly about how they're going to be about long-term investment, they're going to be about giving people skills, it's going to be a high skill, high wage, high productivity economy, a whole lot of things that he didn't actually really deliver on once

they got there, right, in terms of the investment that would deliver the skills that would deliver the high productivity economy and all the rest of it. It just ended up sort of collapsing behind here's the city of London, here's financial services, it's all good, you know, for a really quite long period of time. But that was how they were thinking about it, that's what they were trying to say. So it was a different, it was different to the old labor, old social democratic way of approaching the world where you say, the world's like this, we're going to change it a bit, so it's a bit better. This was more like the world's not great, but we can kind of sand things around a bit and you people can be made so you think the world is better and you're kind of

a better person because of it. Well, there is, there was this, the mental model of, of Blairism, I think is quite, it's sort of, it's a bit, it's a bit Catholic, really, where there is, there is this idea that you are, you are born a baby, you're born with original sin, which is not having employable skills. And then as a baby, and then through the purchase of indulgences and the doing of good works, you can get, you can upskill yourself. Get a fucking job, baby. You can, you can then upskill yourself and, and, and, and attain higher and higher and higher status. And there is, and there is this idea that the economy, the Blairite vision of the economy is not, and this goes for the change UK and so on, and so on, and the conservative parties of Philip

Hammond as well, is basically a moral one where international capital is, is exogenous. You can't control it. But what, but lucky for you, international capital is basically an amalgam of Santa Claus and a calculator that figures out how good you are, how, how valuable your skills are, how much do you know to code, how new is your coding language, and then just distributes you your just rewards based on how good you are. And the, their, and their core assumption to me seems to be that all as the, as the government, our responsibility is to make Britons better. We have to make them all better people so that capital will then the calculator Santa will come down the chimney and then deliver them a high and rising standard of living without us needing to do anything difficult

like tax anyone because we can't do that because that's like trying to shoot down Santa's sleigh and would be considered bad. I think that's exactly it. It's, it's, it's, it's, you get this obsession with skills that everyone's got to learn skills. So you've got to go and whatever skills you have now, you can have better skills, his skills, skills, skills. That's the kind of positive end of it because it possibly means you might learn something. But the negative side of it is that sort of disciplinarian approach to, to how the labor market works, which is actually, you need to be a better person. It's kind of your fault. You haven't got a job. So we're going to force you to get a job and you're going to be a better person because of it. And it comes through

quite strongly, increasingly strongly as new labor sits in office, as they get tighter and tighter about, you know, the, the, the original sanctions regimes and that, and that sort of thing, which the, the introduced and really tighten up on how hard it is to get unemployment benefits and all the rest of it. And you end up with, with what starts to be a really peculiar labor market, because actually what happens is international capital, it cares about some skills. You don't necessarily care about skills, just, you know, wherever they happen to be. It does care quite a lot about cheap labor. That's great. So you can go and employ lots and lots of people in increasing and secure contracts and using agency work and all the rest of it.

And, and they can all have jobs. But then what you also find, it just doesn't create that many jobs. So you look at new labor in office, that they, they create a huge number of either public sector or funded by the government jobs, right the way across the country to the point where, you know, the northeast is about half, more than half of employment is basically in the public sector. This is their model not working. Now they share that in common with, frankly, the major and thatcher governments as well, like fairly consistently British capitalism since the 70s is quite bad. Private sector capitalism, you know, what companies and businesses do is quite bad at creating jobs. So the government always has to step in thatcher, you know, ends up creating

around a million public sector jobs or public sector funded jobs during your time in office. Blair does something similar. So there's kind of a mission or a sort of embarrassed admission that the model isn't working. It's not capitalism turning up from the rest of the world and magically sprinkling jobs across the country. That doesn't happen. It happens a bit around here, like where we are now in London. It doesn't happen across the rest of the country. And they fail to deal properly with the consequences of this. They say, we'll tax the city of London a bit more, we'll redistribute a bit more. It was quite redistributive in office, new labor. It did actually genuinely redistribute quite a lot of money, but that's

compensating for the failure of the entire sort of economic model underneath it. Well, I think the, and we talk about the mental model and the underlying mental model is basically this supply side one where we make people better and that all the government can really do is all popular government. So ultimately, the electorate can really do is create the conditions for international capital to come in and bestow love upon you. So that's slashing the minimum, slash like lowering minimum wages, introducing flexible wages, all of this stuff. So it's trying to basically lay out the milk and cookies for calculator Santa. And the idea was that seeing the consumer is then the protagonist of society. So we ask, we say this mental model and

then the policy deliverer who does Blairism. The idea was the consumer was going to do it through his or her consumer choices made with his or her increased income that they got from some kind of shoulder pads job. And that didn't quite work, did it? In the sense that the consumer is the agent of society, that if as long as we do what consumers say, everyone's going to be happy, that's the sort of belief here. But rather that the public sector, the command sector, if you like, the popular sector has to step back because it can never know what the people really want. And so what we have to do then is always make everything private, or at least public private, or at the very least

introduce like artificial internal markets into it so that we will never have to try to plan something which will be failure prone, instead the market, which is perfect at telling you what people want because money is a the price signal is a very efficient source of information. What people want is a machine that squeezes juice out of a bag. Because the price signal will then fix that for us. I mean, they go mad with this, the introducing to the public sector, the idea that if you can't have a market, you can't actually just sell the thing off wherever your thing is, your school or a hospital or whatever, you can introduce a target. And you can expect all the different

parts of system to work towards that target. And to do so in a way that's kind of morally good and what you want them to do rather than just actually what happens if you set people targets, which is they'll find whatever quick route they can to get there, which happens in fairly dramatic style under new labour. So the most famous example, I think we've touched on this before, but it was a while ago, is the bed trolleys. Yeah, that's right. This is, oh god, the NHS Trust somewhere west of London that was given a target for reducing a number of patients left in beds in hospital, left on trolleys in hospital corridors. So all they did was remove the wheels from the trolleys and then reclassify them as beds, which meant they were no longer

sitting in trolleys in hospital corridors, whilst in fact they're sitting in trolleys without wheels in hospital corridors. I love to live in Soviet Britain. I was going to say, because I was thinking about, there was this famous anecdote about the Soviet Union in which the volume of a target for a factory that made lamps was, they had to do it by weight. And so they just made the basis of the lamps out of lead, really fucking heavy lamps. And there was like, we've made a target. And it's literally that in a way that's even more insidious because it's in a hospital. It's well, welcome to the Britain that exists. But in the weird mirror universe of everything, like the biggest war hawks of the 1980s thought

the Soviet Union was. It's going to be like a weird, like Gladwell style freakonomics thing that like the number of like murders committed by lamp in the Soviet Union massively increased after like that particular production target. This is why Mark Fisher called it market Stalinism. For a reason that you do end up with these completely perverse outcomes. I mean, that is one of the more dramatic ones, but you get sort of lesser versions of that all over the place. The basic problem is this kind of neoliberal thing of like you treat people like rational calculating machines, they will behave like rational, self-interested calculating machines, which is lo and behold, not necessarily always going to be

doing the nice thing that you want them to do. You set them a target and they think, what's the quickest way to get to the target? Not how do I get to the target in the morally good way I'm supposed to? Well, it's not even an issue of a morally good way. It's that the whole, the mental model and the logic and agency model of Blairism is such that it's basically sums up in the idea that we can never do anything directly. We can never take any action. What we can do is we can set incentives and then allow the process of, we can allow the market to then take the action. We cannot move. And another example of this that actually happened today was that a Cornish fishing village has started a campaign that has been referred to as heartwarming,

unfortunately, called Will You Be Our GP? Because the one GP in the village has retired and the village, Mevigissi with a population of 2,000, just does not, is not going to be a profitable place for a GP to set up shop. Because GPs, as you might remember from our episode, Tim Faust, charged between 75 and 100 pounds per patient visit. And if you are a GP, rather than what you're going to do is you're going to move to the place with the most people. But the problem is that kind of policy was designed with the assumption that everyone from Mevigissi, when there just weren't enough people and there wasn't enough economic activity there to warrant a GP, would then dutifully teach themselves to code and then move. And so their

prosperity was always in their hands on the basis that they're willing to do anything that Calculator Santa wants them to do at any given point. For any reason, fuck your family, fuck your home, fuck everyone you've ever known. All you do is exist to react to capital. It's all just like a monkey's paw wish. Like, oh, you wished for a nice old-timey life by the seaside. But the kind of old-timey life you're going to get is cholera. And so did we go back to someone like Philip Hammond, where he says, well, of course, it's impossible that people are living in poverty because we've been so market friendly. The market clearly is lifting people out of poverty. Sure, people might be struggling because they may still

be making themselves better, putting themselves in the right area, learning to code, buying indulgences. But no, they're not damned. As Philip Hammond says, pain is weakness leaving the body. Kinda. But we can see, right? The consequences of this mental model and agency model was a clown society for clowns. None of it has actually worked. But if we understand, then, to have the mental model of capital is exogenous. You can't control it, but it's a good thing. It's benign. So we are going to create the conditions for it to come in and then allow consumers to be both the beneficiaries and the agents of our set of policies. We can then ask the same set of questions for Corbinism.

Well, that's where I think there's something quite interesting here, which is exactly that as the movement has developed, I think it's got better at being self-reflective, thinking about what it is that we're doing anyway, that as you say, it can't be. It looked a bit like this in 2017, where you'd just be, this might be our one shot in the general election. So you have to get Jeremy Corbyn elected. And sort of in people's heads, whether they quite express it like this, is that Jeremy Corbyn's prime minister, all he has to do is go in number 10 and get the big old lever, which is jammed over to neoliberalism, pull it toward socialism. And then that's basically it. And as you sort of go away from that moment, I think there's a

deeper understanding that actually this will involve a series of potentially quite difficult choices or a series of arguments they haven't previously considered. And I think increasingly you get a model of what this might look like, where things like, you know, the Preston model, where things like what is happening on the ground with Jamie Driscoll getting elected up in, up in the Northeast as Metro Mayor up there, where you can start to see piece by piece, you can assemble parts of what a different kind of society and certainly a different government. Operating to different standards might look like. And that I think is where the movement gets some sort of sense about where it's going. That isn't just, you know, stick Jeremy Corbyn number 10,

pull the lever, it's all good. But the lever does exist, just to be clear on that. It's right next to the stop Brexit button. Classic Jeremy, the first thing he goes through is the lever and not the button. I was thinking about this really, because the American historian, political scientist, Corey Robbin talked about this, that if you looked at the sort of sea change that took place in American politics and in British politics, but in the late 70s and early 80s, if you looked at the congressional elections, the midterm elections in 1978, you wouldn't necessarily have predicted that Jimmy Carter was going to lose and that Reaganism was going to be this massive

defining force that it was, that, you know, it completely changed America for the worse. But if you were paying attention to some of the actions on the ground, you could see things like the taxpayers revolt basically in California, the protests that led to the passage of a law that basically makes it illegal for California to race tax, almost impossible to race taxes and basically allows people to never have their homes be valued more than what they were valued in the 70s and avoid paying all property tax. And I think if you look similarly to like James, you're talking about the Preston model, but also just the sheer amount of insourcing that is starting to happen in this country, you can see a shift. And even though people haven't either been celebrating

in the streets because Corbyn is prime minister or conversely losing their minds 24 seven, like you know, they will on the right when Jeremy Corbyn, hopefully Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister. I do think like the ground is shifting. And you are seeing some things. And if you're looking for those details, you're seeing that it's not it's not just one off, it's actually taking place because it's almost like whatever, whatever this cycle, however you define this cycle for neoliberalism, something is ending. You just can't put your finger on what the boundaries of it are going to be. Well, and I think as you know, I mean, we always talk of that all socialist phrase, the old cannot die and the new is struggling to be born. As we seem to be in a position

to make this new thing that we want and to begin removing it from necessarily being identical with a person and start making it more of a movement, I think we need to begin defining these things about what is our logic model? What is our model of agency? Who are the beneficiaries? How do we turn the beneficiaries into the agents? I mean, because with Blair, he crucially fucked up and he assumed that capital would act a certain way and that the consumers who were the agents of Blairism rather would become it's beneficiaries. But it just didn't work like that because capital are not being the agent of Blairism. So we have to ask, how does our movement then, especially as it begins, as it is tested by hurdles after it is in government,

how does it avoid falling into the same traps? How do we make sure we're not, we don't have these bizarre, unstated assumptions like the calculator Santa one? Yeah. So I mean, what you're basically asking is, and I don't have it by any means have the answer, but you're asking Blairism maybe even more weirdly, fundamentally convinced in the sort of inherently natural properties of capitalism than even Thatcher, made the mistake of assuming that too much or assuming that things were unchangeable with regard to the market and that's just allowing it the free run of the country. Are we potentially doing like looking at it that we can just somehow snap our fingers and make it go away or make it

do what we want? That's quite, I mean, this is the big difference between Thatcher, there's many big differences between Thatcher and Blair, but one of them is, is that Thatcher had to fight for something. Thatcher had to fight to make society and the economy look different. And that was actually quite, that was quite a hard process for them to go through. And it wasn't one they were necessarily going to win. Blair sort of doesn't have to do that. It's accepting that fight has already been won and won in a certain way and then trying to deal with the consequences. So, so automatically your version, not just agency, but what you think this government is going to look like and how it's going to operate looks

different. Although if you say that, I mean, if you look at the rhetoric of Blair in particular, and somewhat Gordon Brown, but certainly as the two most senior people in all of this, Blair's rhetoric throughout his time in office, he's always about as some struggle or other, the way he's, what was he, 2000, 2000, one where he's talking about the forces of conservatism they has to take on in his conference speech. There's always- You need to take on board. Well, very good. No, I mean, this is what you label. And the forces of conservatism was both, you know, the Conservative Party and trade unions trapped in their old ways of working and the old

left and whatever they were doing. These were the forces of conservatism that were holding Britain back. They had to sort of generate things to attack largely because they weren't actually doing very much of this. They were accepting the neoliberal settlement. They weren't trying to advance it very much further from where it had gone, or at least not in the same kind of confrontational way that Thatcher did. There were other privatizations. There was a sort of, like we said, the target regime introduced in the public sector, but it was a consolidation rather than an expansion. Indeed. And so, what we're looking at then is, again, like Thatcher, a big bang transformation.

So, Len, let's kind of do the same thing we did for Blairism. What is in some, the core logic model of Corbinism? The core of it, I suppose, is the traditional, there's a traditional sort of British socialist way of thinking about things, which is that if you get a majority elected in Parliament, because we have a hilariously, as we're all discovering, unwritten constitution, that majority in Parliament will be able to carry through the authority to do actually quite radical and dramatically radical, if necessary, things. So, you see this in 1945. This is why people refer back to it. Clear majority appears as if, out of nowhere, the first one that Labour

won, it was a thumping majority. They can do a whole load of really quite radical things. Set up the NHS, nationalise how much of the economy it was, all that kind of thing. So, there's a model there where you say, okay, that's what you have to do. You get a majority in Parliament and this gives you the authority, the ability to use a machinery of state to do all of that. The question you then go back from that point is, how do you get to that majority? And everybody goes round and round and round. How do you form that majority? What do you do at that point? What is the coalition that gets you there? Because under our electoral system, for a clear majority, 40% are upwards. To get that kind of majority working in Parliament,

if you get less than that, you're likely to end up in all sorts of messy situations. So, then the question is, what does your coalition look like? What is the coalition of support that you can put together that will deliver that 40% or more of the vote, which gives you the popular authority and everything else to carry out this programme? That's where it becomes difficult. That's where I think there's a genuine difficulty about what Labour should be saying and looking to. We know we can do well. We got, what, 40% just under 40% in 2017 on the basis of a very robust, but very, what would be the word, very standard social democratic manifesto, right? It was, we will spend more money on public services,

we will tax rich people and big corporations to pay for it, and some stuff that's never been privatised will be moved back into the public sector. So, that's quite a standard. If you stand in the rest of Europe and look at that, you think there is nothing in here that is considered unusual in Northern Europe. You've got Scandinavia, it's like, so what? I mean, this is just like how things are. The screaming hysteria that it was greeted with just shows you how weirdly far, particularly the kind of media chat around this has gone, because that was just standard manifesto. The challenge we have is, will that coalition, can we get that coalition again for the next election, which could be,

frankly, it probably will be as late as 2022? And will the sets of problems we face in 2022 that are expected to address, can they be met by a kind of social democratic offer? And certainly on the latter one, probably not. We are going to have to say and talk about other things, climate change being the most obvious one, the digital economy, the impact of data, that sort of thing being the other. But what does the coalition look like? I think it's a really sort of vex question at this point in time. If we look at the last time, that 1945 government specifically, if we look at that and we give ourselves that counterfactual, we remember at the time we had the total war societal infrastructure to hand. So if we're not looking,

we may not be looking to rebuild a society that's been actively bombed by Germans, but it has certainly been screwed with by several companies that are of German-owned. But the question is, how do we solve this with what we have and electoral coalitions aside? If we say the core logic model of movement Corbinism, rather than necessarily the platform that might have been advanced in 2017, the core logic model as far as we've discussed it, it's basically that international capital is controllable, but it's not benign. Or at least it is a force that is not exogenous. It is within the realm of things you can do things about, especially national capital.

It's Billy Bob Thornton's bad Santa. Indeed. Yeah, fair enough. Actually, that's probably about true. It is bad Santa. It gives you things, but it screws with you and mostly steals and mostly robs you. I think that was the premise of bad Santa. Probably something, an episode title around that. So if the core logic model then is is what? It's a kind of, it is that international capital can and should be controlled, and that labor are, I know I mean labor is in the party. I mean labor is in the class, is then the beneficiary and the agent of Corbinism, but it's not the initial agent. The initial agent seems to be an activist group.

Okay. I think that's part of it. I think the issue about what does international capital do is an important part of what's going on. I mean one of the reasons for hope is the world has changed since 2008 fairly obviously. What we thought or could have thought was this unstoppable force of globalization is ground to a halt and basically gone in reverse. Financial flows, international movement to capital across borders is down 65% globally since 2008. It's shrunk. The amount of trade as a share of GDP has fallen. This globalization, this big unstoppable thing that the Blairites assume was there has in fact stopped and in a certain sense has gone into reverse. Jay Shaw was huge. Where is he now?

Exactly. Shaw down was a banger, but come on. Exactly. The world has shifted in really quite important ways and this is one of them. But what it means is there's a bit more space, in fact a lot more space for governments to do things differently. You don't have to just do neoliberalism. That's one part of it. If you're talking about the core domestic thing, I suppose the issue here is having to do something that both Thatcher and the governments did, which is a shift in ownership. We changed the model of how stuff is owned in our society. In 1945 there's a shift in the model of ownership because things are nationalized. Not everything. 20% of the economy I think is what it gets to is peak,

but that is a shift in the ownership. In 1979 there's a shift in ownership towards, we're going to privatize everything. We call it popular capitalism in practice, just a huge transfer of wealth to the top, 0.1%. We have to break that open and create new ways of owning things. Some of that is going to be the big push on worker ownership and employee ownership. Some of that I think has to be particularly around renewable energy production. It's going to have to be community ownership. Some of it's going to be slightly stranger, at least things that people haven't got used to yet, which is questions around the ownership of data, both creating platform cooperatives, but also how do you personally own and control

the data that you're generating? That's the big shift in ownership. What is the new comments that we're going to create? That's something we have a space to do because I think globalization is not the force it once was, but it's also something we have to do because otherwise the logic of capitalism, certainly in Britain, now is deeply extractive. It's deeply, it's not really productivity growth has sunk to zero thereabouts. Wages are falling. This is a deeply extractive, rent-seeking, destructive model of capitalism we're now up against. You have to do something else. It also seems to me, James, just to jump in on that, that that would also make a shift in ownership or a shift in approach easier to

sell or easier to find consensus with amongst people who would be involved in supporting this because it's not working for people. Exactly. I think that's it. I think you can see it dramatically around the question of housing, particularly in London. The land report that Labour produced, George Mombio and his team this week is actually a really good list, really good analysis of how wealth has become so concentrated in not just property but land, really, and how this is absolutely sort of mashing up the economy for large numbers of other people, anybody trying to get a house, anyone wanting to be a first time buyer in London. It's an extraordinarily difficult prospect by this time. You can see how changes in the form of

ownership could suddenly be very appealing. You can do that with the worker ownership stuff. It can either sound quite esoteric. You can own your company that you're working for, or you can make it quite appealing. Wages have fallen for 10 years, but if you have a share collectively in this company, you get the dividends, you get a chunk of the profits, that's something for your wages, that's straight in your pocket. The Inclusive Ownership Fund proposal I think can be an important part of winning popular support for that shifting ownership. So, in that case then, we can see the agents of Corbinism less are, you could say, you'd say the activist vanguard who are expounding upon these ideas of inclusive ownership,

and more the agents of Corbinism are the owners of things, but the non-capital owners of things, the labor owners of things. And the idea, the whole concept of Corbinism and its main challenge is, as Corbin gets into government, is to enact the policies that will turn beneficiaries of Corbinism into agents of Corbinism, because the forces of reaction will waste precisely no time in portraying, for example, Jeremy Corbin enacting capital controls, which by the way is very easy. You push a button. It's essentially a button push. Is that between the stop Brexit button and the socialism lever? I'm just trying to keep track of what kind of... Milo, don't worry, they're not labeled. What kind of command centre we're

dealing with here? Ten Downing Street has just three things in it. There's a golden lift down to your right, and there's a lever, there's a stop Brexit button, and then there's the magic capital control button. There's the racism button, but actually the word racism is entirely worn off of it. There's the capital control kazoo, and you play the little sound, and then no one can take money out. It's like a big Swiss horn. Also related to the racism button somehow. So Corbinism does not fail from having these unstated assumptions about international capital basically being nice. It says, no, there are material interests, and we represent the material interests of this group, and we are going to try to control and move against the material

interests of these other groups. It doesn't have that kind of willful blindness, but at the same... It's Madonna. They're living in a material world. But at the same time, we also have to prepare ourselves to the fact that as we get into government and as we translate this model into policy through the agents of who enacts Corbinism, we will face resistance, and there will be an amount of time where the forces of reaction will be completely arrayed against us. For example, as we talked about portraying the imposition of capital controls, which might or might not be necessary as a profound economic failure, even though we might say that that would be a success.

Well, I'd say it would be a failure if you end up having to do capital controls. I mean, you are right. It's easy to do this. It's sort of deaths of the 2008 crisis, the Brown government at the time, the land spanky freezing order under anti-terrorist legislation. They froze every single Icelandic bank account in the country. So if you're from Iceland, you suddenly find you can't get your money out of an ATM, that sort of thing, because they place basically the entire country on a terrorist watch list. So if you want to do a capital control... Icelandic terrorists. Yeah, it was quite a diplomatic incident, but that's the... Forced feeding a raw fish in a sauna or something.

I'd say a diplomatic incident is just bullying, really. It's a country of 300,000 people, so you can do this. But at least in theory, capital controls are very easy to implement, but it's a failure if you do it. And I think there's a sort of assumption that you do this, because it's kind of the thing you want to do anyway. If you do this, then it's not what you want to do. What you actually want to do is rebuild the economy and do lots of other things over here. What you don't want to do is start having to impose these big clunky instruments on how capital is being moved. So no, I don't view it as like this would be a success. And I don't view it as like this is something that we want to set out to do. We have to have a different model

of this. This is my point about not getting back into like, wouldn't it be great if the 70s were here again? Right, if our model, Blair has a mistake, international capital's nice, we could have a mistake, weren't the 70s great, and wouldn't it be great to reenact them? James, you could drink beer out of a paint tin. There were gollywags on the jam. It was a great time. I'm glad that you see there you go, the dark side of the 70s, which sometimes there's kind of messy nostalgia you run into on the left, sort of gets forgotten about. There was lots of things that are absolutely terrible. Not usually the stuff that Wright goes on about being terrible, by the way, but there was a lot of things that were terrible. But aside from that, we can't go

back to it, right? So our model can't be here is a big clunky thing to stop how international capital moves. So our model has to be a lot more sophisticated. Our model is we might have to do unpopular things, but when the Argentines invade the Falklands, again, Jeremy Corbyn will see a rise in popularity. That's how it works. We just rerun the 80s, but from the slightly weird point of view of Jeremy Corbyn being Margaret Thatcher, which is... That is a freaky Friday film I would watch. Well, that Jeremy Corbyn becomes a corpse. Yeah, I mean, well, the political landscape has undeniably shifted since the 70s, because in the 70s, coal mining was the left wing thing. And now coal mining is actually the right wing thing. It's flipped. But there's always one party that wants

to bring back coal mining. That's the only hard and fast rule of politics, as far as I can tell. It's less of progression and more just possession in a ballgame. Now they've got coal, right? It's like the game of go, where you're flipping the tiles and so on. But okay, so my question to you is, if we are going to abandon the idea that capital is basically benign and that it will basically do what we ask it and accept the premise that we have to tell capital what to do, how do we do that without resorting to the instruments of the 70s? I think the issue here is something like being, look, you say, here's capital and you think, okay, everybody lines up and calls themselves capital. And it's not really how it works. It's

like different companies have different interests. I mean, take finance as really here we are almost next door to the city of London. Finance is not just one big lump of everybody on the same side, and they all want the same things, right? A hedge fund is not the same as a pension fund. They want quite radically different things. The hedge fund is basically there to gamble and speculate. It has no other purpose. A pension fund is there to produce long-term returns for the people who have pensions, right? So they want very different things. If we have an understanding that the interest diverge and it may actually directly clash at some point, then you can start to think about what you would do as a policy. Because if you want to

say, okay, we have a huge program to decarbonise the economy, that's going to involve a massive investment in smart grids, in new electricity infrastructure, in renewable energy production, in tidal lagoons, all sorts of stuff. Really, really massive amounts of money that will produce a very long-term return. That's something that pension fund might be interested in. The hedge fund really couldn't care less, but pension fund might be. So how you do this is that you adopt a kind of strategic view of where you want to get to and you work out what deal, what kind of arrangement you can come to with the bits of capital that we interest in working like that. That is really the only way through this. New labor did have

a version of this deal. It was basically to go, hey, finance, do whatever you like. We'll just scrape a little bit of tax off the top and that will pay for the NHS and stuff. And that kind of worked for, with all the problems we talked about, kind of worked for about a decade. Right, well, 97 to 2007. Did that happen for as long as the credit bubble was growing? The city could carry on producing more and more debt. Do you scrape a bit of taxes off the top? It all looks pretty good until it crashes. So we can't do that. And we're certainly not going to try and reproduce anything along those lines. But if we have a slightly more sophisticated version of that arrangement where you say, actually, these things we don't like,

don't really like hedge funds, don't really like speculation, don't like tax avoidance. So we are going to do something about tax havens and offshore trusts and all the rest of it. But we are quite interested in long-term investment. We do actually want to see this happening. Then you can come to a more sophisticated arrangement, I think, and one that can work. And one that can work in conditions where, as I said, the global setting is that the international capital and globalization and these things that are big, supposed to be big, inevitable forces bearing down on us, just aren't as big and as inevitable as they used to be. The global economy looks more broken up. I mean, visibly, you can see it. This is what

the China versus US trade was about. This is the thing breaking up. That creates space. It also seems, James, like what you're saying is to avoid looking at it as though finance and capital are homogeneous or unanimous, because that's the tendency for people to see like, they see it as the force of reaction. And as such, they think that everything they do is going to be instantly unanimous, whereas it's a lot of discordant voices seeking, A, the easiest way to profit or investment, and B, how to gain advantage on their competitor. Exactly. That's exactly it. It's a band of warring brothers to quote Marx. I mean, this is absolutely, you know, they're all part of the same family, but they don't get on particularly well,

right? And I think if you have that attitude, then you can start to see what you might do, because you wouldn't make a difference, right? It's obvious. It's built in. If you're talking about the mental model of Corbinism, it is just true that we have some bits of businesses that we think aren't too bad, and some bits of businesses we think are really bad, right? And you can draw up very easily what they are. We're not very keen on hedge funds and speculation. We don't mind businesses that pay a good wage and have unionization. It's kind of that clear in some ways. But in the sense that our economy has been so geared towards non-unionization, you might say, private equity styles of ownership, extreme leverage,

and so on, and so on. I think the question remains, when Corbin is elected, I'm going with when, Corbin or Corbin II, whoever Corbin II is, then we will still face such a large regearing of the economy away from that, that there is certain to be a sort of quite large disruption, and that it is going to present immediate problems. And I wonder if we have worked out how we solve those problems yet that come from that disruption, from us regearing towards a more inclusive, fairer economy in which the benefits of society are shared by all. And also the hysteria that inevitably is going to surround it. Oh, yeah. He can't even take a shit without someone calling it sinister.

I mean, oh no, he's accidentally lent on the racism button. I mean, that's there. That's priced in, right? By this point, it's sort of, they'll jump and shout and that will happen, whatever. It's already happening now. It'll happen during the election campaign. It'll happen if Jeremy Corbin gets elected when, I should say, I think we should be more optimistic about these things. So that's there. The issues, I think, in terms of actually like, how do you carry out your program? The biggie for me, isn't like, there's no sinister plot here. But if you're dealing with a civil service that's spent 40 years basically being neoliberal, right, that is the entire careers

of people who've spent all their time just doing neoliberal things. And that's how they think. And that's how everything is geared up to work. And then you turn around and say to everyone, hey, we're going to do this thing where you don't work on a kind of neoliberal... You're not doing a skills program. You're not doing a skills program. You're not funding... That's every... Whatever the sort of continuity Blairism gets onto Twitter, they always like to remind you that, oh, Blair spent these unprecedented amounts of money on various kinds of public services.

When, in fact, what it seems that he was doing was he was funding the middle managers who were doing a lot of the checking and oversight, observation, targeting the HR directors who were making sure that everyone had the right skill brands and so on and so on. So it's... You're trying to get rid of that. Yeah, you're certainly not... You don't want the model of this new public management, they call it where everything's a target, everything's like you intensely monitor what people are doing in the public sector because you assume that they can't perform their job properly unless they give targets and clear responsibilities and that sort of thing.

You want to get back to a kind of public service model where people are doing their jobs because they want to do their jobs, right, which is sort of ideal for these things. Most people actually end up teaching or in hospitals or wherever are doing it because they want to do it because they like the job, they think it's good to do something that's useful to people. Podcasting. Get that podcasting. Podcasting is up there in the list of socially useful things that we all do because... Exactly. Because it's good for people.

Where would you be without the Village Podcaster? When the Village Podcaster and Cornwall retires, then they're really fucked. So you get back to that public service podcasting model that's how the public sector ought to be working. That's what you want to try to introduce. And that's quite a slow process. But if you're talking about right in the middle of it, if you're talking about the senior civil servants, the sort of bits of the state that are supposed to be there setting the direction, it is just going to be hard. It's like the literal treasury rule book, the Green Book, is written basically in an ill-able way. There's some bits and bobsies there. You can sort of take

account of society and the environment if you have to when you're making decisions. But the way that is laid out is geared towards saying, right, if you're doing something, it's a cost-benefit analysis, what is the market return you're going to get from this, right? If that's your operating system for the treasury, you need to rewrite this and you need to kind of get people to behave differently. And then that is going to be a challenge all by itself. That's even before we get into like, oh, there's going to be some big old plot or whatever that. It's for the birds, really. This is what the problem is going to be. And it's a problem of implementation. It's a problem of things not working as they should work.

It's a problem of having to explain to me why things aren't working as they should work, because you're trying to make a big shift. In terms of a big shift in the economy, the other one to bear in mind is that, look, when you say you've got 10 years because the IPCC says you've got basically 10 years to sort out climate change, right? Capitalism will adapt to that. It already is. And it's already kind of working out ways that it's going to have to think about what that means for itself. The Bank of England right now has a big program where it's trying to encourage banks and other financial institutions to think about what they have in terms of stranded assets, things that they can't use once you have global warming and you can't

just burn all the coal you ever want to, right? Because that actually has a financial consequence. You own a coal company, if you're a bank, a coal mining company, and suddenly it's not worth anything, right? That's a problem. So they're already trying to manage this. And part of what I think we're going to be doing for the next 10 years, and let's hope we can sort of turn this around one way or the other, is dealing with ways in which you're managing that crisis, dealing with alternative ways to manage that crisis. There's a political expression to this. There's a fascinating article in Descent by Kate Aronoff on the rise of sort of eco-nationalism. There's a right that says, actually, after years of denying climate change can even happen,

and now happily adopted it. What's the Front National calling itself in France now? No idea, I'm afraid. I can't remember it. Anyway, they did a whole rebranding exercise, basically the same thing. The Provisional Front National. Take a leaf out of Change UK's Well Thumb Book. The Independent Front National. They are quite heavily into saying, actually, you know, the borders are our biggest defence against climate change, right? So you can see a very aggressive, right, reactionary version of this. The hot air, it cannot come into France. This is the new technique. So it's that the question then becomes, adaptation to climate change is going to happen.

And the question then is, how do we adapt in a way that doesn't involve shooting all the billionaires to live in paradise space stations? And instead... That's what you were just going to say, just shooting all the billionaires. Well, I think that's the one we've got right now, which is the billionaires go live in paradise space stations. We have a Mad Max disaster. Mad Max slash Metal Gear. Well, we have a Mad Max disaster, but they have a total recall disaster when they discover that they're living in like a Mars base that was designed by Elon Musk. And so it has all kinds of quirky, nerdy Easter eggs. Like, you know, it plays like, you know, the Star Trek

thin noise when you open the door or whatever. But like, actually, there's no oxygen. Can you mark that? Video preview. Okay. So really, what we have to confront, I think, as a movement generally, is that we have these interlinks. We have a coherent proposition. We understand what it is that we're trying to do. We see the world in a way that I think is more realistic than Blairism. And Blairism referring to all the things surrounding Blairism, the neoliberal model, more realistic. And we understand exactly who's going to benefit and why. But I think that in asking those questions, in looking at how this works, step by step, we highlight that we do have these problems and that we have a very limited

time to solve them. Fuck. Yeah, no, no, no, we do have a very limited time to solve them. And most of the solutions you're going to get if you just let capitalism run its course are going to be fairly, fairly ugly. But there are other sort of ugly solutions to it that involve a great deal of authoritarianism, for example, which is also unpleasant. So if you want the solutions that are kind of fair to everyone and therefore viable, because I strongly suspect we're not going to be able to, we're not going to be in a position, and we wouldn't want to be in a position to just impose like pro-environmental solutions on people, look at Zulezion. This was a protest about a rise in fuel taxes. Apparently, under the guise of this is how we're going to solve climate change,

you're going to make people pay more for their petrol. And lo and behold, people were pissed off about that because after years of falling wages and all the rest of it, and the woeful state of public transport away from TGVs or whatever in France, they weren't going to put up with it. So if you want something that works, that's going to be a high degree of consent. And that's where we're back into like, well, what does this movement look like? Because how do you win consent? Like part of that is going to have to be something on the ground that you're already doing to win that consent. And winning consent, not just in the moment of election, but continuing to win consent for

the public every day, I think by looking at our model step by step, and by looking at it also in the comparison to the Blair whatever neoliberal model, we raise these important questions, questions like how do we win the consent of people, not just on election day, but daily, throughout government? How do we keep them bought into this program when we're not going to be able to deliver all of it right away? And when international capital is going to be, even though it is less mobile than before, still throwing up every roadblock it possibly can to something that will threaten its profits. And what do we as a movement need to do to get beyond these problems? I quite frankly don't know. I don't know necessarily what we

have to do, what we should be doing. I know that it's worth doing because otherwise, it seems like we all die. And I don't want to do that necessarily. Keeping it open. I don't want to put off the death lobby. Look, you guys are important too. What I'm saying is, I don't know the answers to these questions. And I think if we want to take our movement seriously, there are questions that I think a lot of us just answer by saying, we'll do capital controls. We'll pull the lever. And I don't think that's enough. We have to have a better, more developed answer to these questions. And it's a question worth answering. We just don't have it yet. So if any of our listeners

out there in podcast land have thought of an answer, please write an article about it for gettingyourdicksuck.com. And we will try to shift the Overton window with our fantastic publication. Everyone likes getting their dick sucked. Look, Riley, one day we may own the means of production, but until then, we can only own the lips. James, thank you very much again for coming on. It's always a pleasure to have you in the basement. Thank you for having me. That was an interesting and wide-ranging chat. I think it's probably the fairest way to describe that. An interesting and wide-ranging chat raves James Redway. So the usual litany of stuff. Number one, it's my birthday week. So I'm the birthday bitch.

Number two, when this comes out, it will be my birthday week. And I'm going to be a very sassy birthday bitch. So everybody send me all of your good wishes, but don't send them to me directly. Please mail them to me in a postcard to this studio, which you don't know the address for. You'll figure it out. Secondly, we have a live show on the 15th of June, 8 p.m., Wolfson College in Cambridge. Do come out to that. We'll be only having some chuckles, some good times, and I don't know if we're driving or taking a train, but maybe some beers, and that should be very fun. Please buy a dang ticket. Also, really importantly, the week that this comes out on the 13th, which is a Thursday, myself and Ben Pope are doing previews about

Edinburgh shows at the Sekford, which is where my comedy night normally runs. And it's completely free. Please come because I organized this short notice because I need to do some things to my show, but it's slightly too short notice to promote it properly. So come down and see your boy. It won't cost you anything. Ben Pope also very good at comedy, if you're not familiar with him. Very funny. Very funny. Very funny man. Very funny man. Successful. Very well attended Christmas parties Ben Pope throws. Fantastic. Sorry, Donald Trump meeting Ben Pope and just thinking he's the Pope. He's like, oh, terrible. Didn't wear the hat. Very disrespectful. Record deepness. And finally, you can also get a second episode on Patreon if you want to do so.

I recommend it. They're pretty fun. Five bucks a month, you know the deal. James, do you have anything to plug in or are you still working on your book? I'm still theoretically working on my book. It was due in last week, so we're way beyond the point at which it should be written. I'm also in Cambridge actually next week, on the 13th. They're doing a meeting for the Cambridge Labour Club on what is Corbinism or something along. I really ought to check the title before turning up on it. I mean, let's have them listen to this. That sounded good. So, yeah, you can come to that if you're in Cambridge.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Cambridge people, lots of calls to action for you on this pod. Anyway, we'll talk to you later. you