Hello, hello, hello and welcome. I'm Mehran Khalili and we are DiEM25,
a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team, featuring subversive
ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking
about the United Kingdom, or more specifically,
the political chaos in the United Kingdom. Yes, Britain normally has a reputation as a pretty stable country, but it's now had
three prime ministers in just two months. The middle one, Liz Truss, announced the biggest tax cuts in living
memory and then reversed them, bringing the economy to the edge
of economic collapse. She lasted 44 days. Her replacement, once again unelected,
is a man of the people. Just not many people. He's Rishi Sunak,
a former hedge fund manager with a net worth twice that of King Charles, and now
the richest ever occupant of Number Ten. But the political soap opera aside, regular Brits are going
through a very tough time. They're contending with
soaring food and energy prices, rising mortgages
and a growing pension crisis. More than 1 million more people in the UK
are expected to be forced into poverty this winter, pushing deprivation levels
to their highest for two decades. And on top of it all, their new government is now priming them
for more austerity, with familiar talk of hard choices now
making the rounds in establishment media. So, what can British people and those around Europe expect from this
latest unelected Tory government? What is the opposition Labour Party, which is leading in all polls
for the next general election offering? And what can UK voters that actually want
policies that put people first vote for? To answer these questions and more,
we have our panel, which includes our own Yanis Varoufakis and UK
campaigner Julia Moore. And we have a special guest today, Marshajane Thompson,
previously the head of campaigns for Jeremy Corbyn and now
coordinator of the campaign 'Your NHS Needs You'
and you out there if you have anything you want to say,
any questions, comments, thoughts, rants, concerns, just drop
them in the YouTube chat. This is live and we'll
put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Yanis. Over to you. [Yanis] Thank you, Mehran, Hello, everyone,
hello comrades. Just before we start, - before you just joined the livestream - a facetious but not utterly
pertinent comment that I made, I said that the problem with my British
friends, whether they are Tories or Corbynistas, like myself, is that you
think that you're too exceptional. You think that either you're
exceptional and fantastic, that Britannia rules the waves and
the airwaves and our psyche, Britain is so deeply fucked that it is
exceptional in this opposite way. And my views for my friends in Britain,
folks, you're neither, you're neither exceptionally brilliant nor exceptionally terrible. You're somewhere in between,
like the rest of us. We are mundane, all of us,
here in Greece, in Germany, in France. We are in a stagnation crisis. A crisis of stagnating
financialised capitalism. Where the crisis that began in 2008 flares up one day in Greece, another
day in Italy, another day in Britain. But it's the same crisis. We are all in the same ship. It's a terrible ship. It is leaking, it is taking in water. And the people below decks, the many,
the poorer, the exploited, the precariat, the proletariat, are suffering deeply,
not just in Britain, but everywhere else. but allow me to, - oh, by the way -
one small comment, Mehran, as comrades, we need to
take each other to task and keep the debate lively. So let me challenge the very
conventional account that you presented to begin with. This thing about unelected governments, come on, I really don't buy that. Unless you want a presidential system, a parliamentary system,
is the best of all possible lots. And that means
that Parliament will have the capacity to elect
and re-elect prime ministers. The alternative to that is a system like
that of the United States or France, and that is a terrible process. Effectively, it's the manifestation of first-past-the-post, electing essentially
an emperor. And so, the fact that the Tory Party have messed things up and they have given us
three idiots, one after the other, in quick succession in 10 Downing Street,
is not the fault of the electoral system, the fault of those people
in the Labour Party who did their utmost to undermine Jeremy Corbyn so that the Brexiteers under Johnson would win. And unfortunately, we have a situation now where the greatest usurper of British
democracy, a certain Mr Sir Keir Starmer, is going to become the greatest
beneficiary of the chaos that he has helped seal with that idiotic campaign
of his for a second referendum. But I'm digressing. So let's go back to what
has gone down over the last few months
since the pandemic's ebbing. After 2008,
when the City of London, Wall Street, the Frankfurt banks, the Paris banks,
went bankrupt, central banks and governments
under the leadership of Gordon Brown. - Let us not forget April 2009 -
Gordon Brown got all of the G7, presidents, prime ministers,
central bankers and practiced socialism for the
financiers, socialism for the oligarchs. They printed, my estimation, about
$18 trillion to give it to the bankers. That took the form of
zero interest rates, what's called quantitative easing,
targeted long term refinancing options. These are all the technical terms
for socialism for the bankers. And that created a deflationary period,
because there was austerity at the same time for the many, in Greece, Britain, George Osborn,
Germany, everywhere, Italy. So the result was that
there was a lot of money in the financial sector and no money
in the pockets of people out there. Investment collapsed, because who wants to produce stuff
for a public that doesn't have any money? So, the monied,
who had the money, outbid one another
in the stock exchange in the south of England, buying houses,
works of art, bitcoin, any kind of idiocy that was available,
they bought it with the money that was printed
by the Central Banks. And then there was the lockdown. And the lockdown did two things which changed the situation and shattered
this bubble of financialization, of post the 2008-2009 financialization. The first thing
that the pandemic did was it choked supply by stopping transport,
sea transport, land transport, air transport, by disrupting
the supply chains. Suddenly aggregate supply
of goods and services was choked. And at the same time, for the first time since 2009,
some of the money that was printed by the Central Banks trickled
down to the many, furlough schemes and some support for those who would have otherwise died
locked up in their flats and houses. So, you have a combination:
supply goes down because of lockdown,
demand creeps up a little bit. Demand for the goods and services
that the many could now spend, the little furlough wages and social benefits that they
got during the pandemic. When demand goes up and supply crashes,
prices go up. So we had the first inflationary bout
13 years after the crash of 2008. And that shattered this socialism for the
bankers and austerity for everybody else. Equilibrium. The United Kingdom
is not exceptional enough. The situation that you face
in the United Kingdom is exactly the same as the situation that we
face in the European Union, the Eurozone, actually is
worse than the Eurozone. I will say a few words about that,
the United States and so on. What happened was that there
must be some 'canary in a mine'. Britain was the canary
in the G7 mine. It could have been
somebody else. It could have been Germany,
it could have been the United States. This bond crisis, the crunch that created
the panic in the financial markets, in the gilt market, in the market
United Kingdom public debt which led to the demise of Liz Truss,
could have started anywhere. The fundamentals of Britain
were not worse than those of the rest of the
financialised capitalist West. Just so happened that the UK did
to the rest of the G7 that which Greece had done
to the rest of the Eurozone in 2010. It was a dirty job of bursting
the bubble and somebody had to do it. The reason why it happened
to the United Kingdom was because you had
the demise of Boris Johnson. Now remember, as Britain
was getting out of the second lockdown, Rishi Sunak, who was
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, - the Finance Minister of Britain -
made noises, made austerian noises. He started talking about doing some austerity in order
to arrest the build up of debt. And Boris Johnson,
who is a far better politician than Rishi Sunak who has a sense of what
the people out there want, not that he is going to
give it to them, but he's more of an astute political
antenna than Rishi Sunak is, slaps Sunak down and said no,
you're not doing that. I want to be prime minister. I don't want an austerity averse
UK public to turn against the Tories. But when party-gate and various other
shenanigans brought Johnson down, there was a question of who was going
to succeed him. Sunak had the inner lane,
the inside lane, and then Liz Truss decided that the way she's going to
defeat Sunak was by appealing to some of Thatchers' legacy, small parts of her legacy,
and tried to attack Sunak from the right, from the libertarian right, talking about
huge tax cuts, especially for the rich. You cannot lose with the rank and file
of the Tory Party if you promise huge taxcuts for the rich
because this is how they're a bunch of old
regressives, reactionaries who are voting
for the leadership of the Tory Party. Amongst the MPs,
she was not supported as much as the Sunak was,
but she won the popular vote, the vote within the Tory Party amongst
those who have never heard of a bad war or a tax cut for the rich
that they didn't like. The Liz Truss tragedy and the reason why she
sparked off this domino effect was that she did something that the markets were
not forgiving her for. The markets were in turmoil in the United States and to
a lesser extent in Britain before her mini budget. She reversed the order of what
the markets and the rich wanted. They wanted austerity first
and then tax cuts, which is what Thatcher had done. Thatcher had slapped down austerity. - I remember, I lived in Britain
at the time after April 1979 - she destroyed
the working class through austerity, and then, once the fiscal situation
of the UK state was stabilized, she redistributed income
through tax cuts. Liz Truss reversed it. She proposed huge tax cuts,
didn't say anything about austerity, hoping that, you know, by the time her
prime ministership was safe, she would in six months,
seven months, eight months, she would impose huge austerity. Because the markets were so unstable she was punished. And now Rishi Sunak has come back to do that which he was trying
to do when he was Chancellor. to do Mario Draghi,
to do what Mario Draghi did in Italy, what the Troika did in Greece, what Thatcher did
after the 1981 budget in particular. But allow me to finish by saying a few words about... We are a pan European
democratic movement. Now let's look at Germany.
Okay? So my friends in Britain,
you're not as stuffed as you think. Look at Germany. Half of Germans rent
rather than own property and they typically keep their
savings in bank accounts. They have no financial assets, they
don't own homes, they don't own shares. They've missed out. The middle class of Germany
thus, have missed out on the compensating wealth gains over the last decade
from the socialism for the rich. And now they are being
struck by inflation, which increases their rents
much faster than your housing costs in Britain increase, while the savings that are
in a simple savings account are being depleted
faster than yours are, due to inflation. If you look at the bottom 10% of the general population, they are 8%
worse off today than they were in 1995. And if you look at the bottom 40%
of the German population, they are stuck in the same place
as they were in 1995. And now they are facing
a commodity squeeze, electricity bills through
the roof and so on. Because of the structure of
the German political economy. I just explained why inflation is
so much more toxic in Germany because of very few assets
being owned by the other Germans. Inflation is much more of a problem. Now, let me remind you that when
the European Central Bank was put together and the German state agreed to subject
itself to the European Central Bank and to subjugate the German Central bank,
the Bundesbank, to the ECB, the implicit contract was that the ECB
would work and act as the Bundesbank did. Let me tell you a back of an envelope
calculation that I've done. If that were the case, we should have seven and a half
percent interest rates in the Eurozone. That would destroy Italy. The Italian state would go bankrupt. Not just Italy, because there's
a lot of focus on Italy. Let me give you some numbers
which I've just jotted down here. If you look at the total debt,
total debt, private and public, of France,
it's 351% of French national income, three and a half
times French national income. In the case of Britain,
it's only 2.7 times 271. And it's 200 in Germany, okay? The Italian total debt is a bit
above the same level as the British one. So, DiEM25 needs to focus on this crisis being
the same crisis that began after 2008. It is the same in Germany,
in France, in Italy, in Greece
and in the United Kingdom. We don't give a damn about Brexit. For us the United Kingdom
is part of Europe. Not the European Union,
but part of Europe. And we would have to campaign in the United Kingdom,
in the European Union, everywhere to save our NHS's from austerity,
to save the precariat from austerity, or to bolster their
defenses against austerity. Same with the proletariat, same with women, minorities,
who are always the first victims of austerity, because austerity
is back with a vengeance. Rishi Sunak was trying to introduce
this under Boris Johnson. Now, he has his chance. Let me finish off
in the way that I finished in an article in the
New Statesman, which I think came out today, or is coming out tomorrow
in paper form, in print form. A small point which I think
confirms the DiEM25 line about the need for collective
action across Europe and the UK. Do you know what Mario Draghi, - who shut down the big banks
and practiced austerity in Italy - Mario Monti,
- who was appointed by Angela Merkel to be Prime Minister in Italy in order to produce
the earliest phase of austerity - Lucas Papademos,
- who became the Greek Prime Minister, technocratic Prime Minister, in 2011
to usher in and to solidify the murderous, genuinely murderous
austerity that we had then - and Rishi Sunak have? They all worked for Goldman Sachs. Thank you. [Mehran] Thank you, Yanis. Marshajane, Marshajane Thompson,
the floor is yours. [Marshajane] Great,
thanks everyone. It's a really depressing time politically
in the UK, so, I was hoping to come onto events like this and we can do
our international solidarities. We get strength from each other in fighting back, but as
Yanis said, we're fucked. But, I'm sure that we will all take some
inspiration from each other and actually we are obviously still making a difference
with the fantastic 'Your NHS Needs You' campaign that I'll come on to, but just
to kind of briefly, end off here. Obviously, Mehran and Yanis
already mentioned, we've had a revolving door of Prime Ministers and cabinet members. For the Health Secretary we've had four now, in 100
days or something ludicrous. We have Rishi Sunak again, Mehran said twice as rich as the King,
a nice former banker, billionaire,
million pound houses in California as well as Yorkshire and London and he's going to
undoubtedly try and gloss over his record in government when
he was the Chancellor. He was at the helm when the Tory chaos and incompetence reached its height
and caused the cost of living crisis. And you can't really stress how bad the cost of living crisis
is in some parts of the UK. We have in the northeast 39.4%
of our kids hungry in complete food poverty
in the 6th richest country in the world. People don't see the faces behind those
statistics, but that's virtually half of every class actually sitting
there hungry through their lessons as a direct result of Sunak's
choices as Chancellor. We have 7 million people
living in cold homes, thousands of excess winter deaths last
year and this year millions more in fuel poverty because of their failures
to handle the fuel costs crisis. And Boris Johnson famously said:
You let the bodies pile high in Covid but we're seeing many more
bodies pile high now through the impact
of their twelve years of austerity. And as Yanis said, they're kind of the new
austerity 2.0 that's coming soon. We've had those twelve years of cuts, led us to a housing crisis, a crisis
in social care, a crisis in education. We're seeing bits of people
fighting back. Now, we're seeing hundreds of thousands
of workers saying enough is enough. From barristers to bin workers, nurses, ambulance workers, posties, teachers,
everyone saying our pay is so low now. There was always that sound bite, even a year or two years ago, people
choosing between heating or eating. And we are inundated with people that can't do either,
they can't afford to exist. Food banks and warm banks and we know
Sunak is just going to continue in that vein: austerity 2.0, yes,
but also still making decisions to give tax cuts to the richest, still making
decisions on lifting bankers' bonuses. And I know that as part
of the discussion tonight, to move us onto the NHS is whether or
not progressives should be calling for a general election, whether
or not it's a bit of a distraction, whether or not we have a fantasy
that he is democratically elected by our parliamentary system
and what should be done about that. But from the NHS's point of view, regardless, we need a campaign
to save the NHS now. It's not going to last until the next
general election, whenever that comes. It's not going to last
for the next few months if we don't really ramp up
our campaigning around that. We've seen decades of privatization
by stealth, just destroying various bits of the NHS, from the bed capacity
to staffing, to bits of it completely siphoned off to different private
companies, from Centene, and American
health insurance companies coming in and just
buying big chunks of it. And to the extent of
in the last ten years now, we've given 100 billion
from the NHS budget directly to profit making companies directly at the expense
of the services that have been provided. Just to take one small recent example, rather than bore everyone with stats,
but one quite specific one that came out just this week is
that Pfizer made from the UK 2 billion in profit from the vaccine. So just the profit was 2 billion. That's six times the amount that the pay
rise for nurses would cost. That money could revolutionize
what's left of the NHS already. and what we're seeing in the NHS
in the main, but also in other areas of public services, is
the function of the government not being to govern, but the function of the
government purely being to transfer public money
into corporate hands as much as they can. That impact on the health of people
in the UK, as I've mentioned, the poverty stuff, but it's
the preventable deaths in the NHS. We are seeing thousands of deaths that could have been prevented that are
now happening because of privatization, with direct links to privatization,
whether or not that be because there's twelve ambulances
waiting in queues outside the hospitals, that can't get in, or from overcrowding,
or from people dying on trolleys because the doctors haven't got round them
yet because of the lack of doctors. We're seeing people that are not getting
their diagnosis from breast cancer because it's all been outsourced
in the diagnostics and there's various different scandals coming to light
about documents being lost. There's also a direct link
to privatization and moving it on. Obviously, I could
go into details for hours on the various
different minutiae, of problems in the NHS, but that's kind of really what brings me
on to the 'Your NHS Needs You' campaign and why DiEM and other UK partners
decided we needed to do this because, obviously we're speaking
internationally, but in the UK, people don't know
that this is what's going on in the NHS. It's been done so underhandedly
over years or by stealth, that people haven't realized
the impact of that and they're
starting to look at that. Post Covid and the obscene amounts
of profits that people saw being made by PPE while nurses
were wearing bin bags or from Test and Trace being such a monumental
failure and taking billions, people kind of looking at it
and saying we want to know where that money
is going now. There's a higher level
of scrutiny of these type of things. So, we decided that
we were going to try and speak to some celebrity voices
to use their platform to get the message out there of what's happening and this is the
kind of last chance saloon, if you like. So we had a big comedy night
with comedians that hopefully are
internationally famous, like Stephen Fry and Frankie Boyle,
and they lent their voices to the campaign,
told people to go and look at yournhsneedsyou.com
and get involved and to drill down into
exactly what's happening. We're now about to embark on a project with Russell Brand and he's again lending
us his voice and his YouTube show to get, not just our voices on there, but also, people that have been
impacted by privatisation and campaigners and doctors
that have been involved with us. So, yesterday we had Dr. Bob Gill
on Russell's show, talking specifically about the impact of the blood
service and the plasma service in the NHS. Which, when Jeremy Hunt
- who is the new shadow Chancellor - who says he's going to rescue us
from the twelve years of Tory chaos, when he was the Health Secretary he sold the National Health blood service,
the plasma service, to an American company called Bain
for 240.000.000 and the American company
sold it to a Chinese company. Now we have a crisis in our blood service
and people can't have operations because there isn't enough plasma and
that's leading to extra deaths. So, we need to really get that out there, but we also need to get out there
that the National Health Service, as we know it, has already been
destroyed in England. It's already been broken up
into 42 different pieces. Those 42 different pieces all have their
own budget, their own little boards that can make corrupt contracts to their
own little private companies and it's kind of mass destruction of
the National Health Service as we can see it. So, check out Dr. Bob
on Russell's show yesterday which is at Rusty Rockets and have a look at Yanis hopefully coming on again
in a couple of weeks to talk to Russell about it as well because it's obviously
not just important for the UK. The NHS has been held up as a beacon for
other countries for a while and we were talking
before about the impact after the financial crash
on Greece's doctors and everything and before anybody screams
at me about Labour, I'm not intentionally missing them out. Obviously they did also have a massive,
huge impact on the NHS. The legacy of PFI has said currently, I think there's £80 billion for NHS
hospitals to fix, and that's historical. But even now, currently, we see
Labour spokespeople talking about
public-private partnership and talking about using
the private sector to bring down the 7 million on the waiting list,
which obviously doesn't work. The more private sector people you bring
in to bring down the waiting list, they cherry pick the easy cases
and take a load of money out of it and actually the waiting lists get longer. Definitely on an individual level people with more serious
cases wait a lot longer. So, unless we really kind of ramp up our
campaign, which we're hoping that we are doing now with this
thing with Russell Brand and everything else, we hope
you check it out, which is: '@yournhsneedsyou'
and get involved with us and hopefully we can stop the full
Americanization of the NHS. [Mehran] Thank you Marshajane. Well, I can speak to that
what you've seen. I just came back from the UK
and I saw a family member who was in a NHS hospital
and the state is horrifying. It's absolutely horrifying
what I saw there, and people don't
deserve that. Anyway. Julia.
Julia Moore. [Julia] Thank you.
Thank you Mehran. Carrying on from Marshajane, or actually,
if I can carry on from Mehran, yeah, two very close friends,
family members, one mild heart attack. No ambulance even promised,
was taken to hospital by her own family. And a dear friend who had
a bad fall at home. Eleven and a half hours
on the floor because of the lack of services
in that particular area. So, very much the NHS crisis very much
starting to impact on everybody. For our international listeners,
we've used the phrase: 'Of a postcode lottery'
for a long time and Marshajane
has just given the explanation. The collective NHS that was part of the social contract postwar
begins to break down by stealth. And the 2012 Act was the real push towards privatization,
which is now effectively in play. And Marshajane has
covered that exquisitely. So, I'm not going to specifically add anything more to that,
but sort of linking what Yanis and Marshajane
have been talking about: what it represents. What it represents for us
as a DiEM25 UK within this progressive movement. It's going to be a laboratory. Whereas Brexit showed
a global structural malaise of people being reduced to a technical topic down
to a binary yes or no. Forensically, I think Yanis has used
the phrase it forensically showed the world how systems like referenda are
antithetical to democracy because they break down technical topics
into over simplistic yes or no. The NHS and the work that Marshajane
is doing on the campaign actually could be part
of our active campaigning. Now Dusan, we have an
exquisite campaign director where we're beginning to encourage to be a lot more campaign active. Now, in the UK the NHS, of course,
as we've just said, touches everybody. One could say, you could
argue that about everything education, housing
and jobs creation. I know the UK team specifically are
very passionate about jobs creation. Our medics on the UK team are saying:
If you don't have job security, you're going to have a poor
health life journey. In this case, it's all interrelated. And that's what is confusing. This is why people don't get active, because they see a whole issue out there,
they're overwhelmed by it. And our job is to break it down,
to say you can be active, you can do things. And I think the NHS,
as Marshajane is saying, if we work in conjunction, the NHS campaign can actually be part
of our project of asking people to do things that
they can do locally because this is going
to impact on them. Austerity is going to impact on
60 million people as it is, across Europe. In that respect, what Yanis is saying is that we do have to get
over our exceptionalism. The UK is no different to any other
country going under terrible stress and we have to get over ourselves
and do something about it. So the NHS campaign tells us once again how we can act collectively to have
that single focus of what it is we want, organize ourselves and be
able to achieve it. Now we have those
good campaign templates for our climate policies and the oligarchs
that Dusan is introducing. And of course, the oligarch campaign sits very nicely with the NHS campaign
and certainly the UK team. And we would ask anybody specifically
in the UK or across the world who has an interest in that,
that they can keep an eye on the plans that we're going to have,
to marry those two. So, within the context of the
political system in the UK, the malaise of not acting because
things are happening by stealth, which is of course,
a very subtle political technique. As Yanis said, Boris was
a very very astute politician in knowing
what people wanted to hear in the way that Thatcher promoted
the dream of privatization because people wanted to hear
that they would become better if they became
part of a shareholding democracy. It's old wine in new bottles. So, the parliamentary system in the UK on the whole would work if 43 million
people shone a light now and then and asked questions and spoke to their MP and ask why they voted
in the way that they did for example. There are things that people can do. If you have only 20 minutes
a week to do something, you can do something
that just takes 20 minutes. If you've got longer time than that,
you can work on other things. It's getting people into the mindset to say, unless we
are active, this is what happens. Austerity is a political choice. I'm sure Yanis has said
that over and over again. And it's a political ideology. You don't have to adopt austerity as
a government, as a political ideology. It's a choice and it's going to come
back at us with huge strength. And only 43 million people under the system, until we change the system, can do something about it. The issue about most
countries is that you have an engaged group
of people who are active but they're not enough of the
voting electorate to make a big impact. Now, we mustn't forget in the UK, that the UK is made up
of four countries and our colleagues in Scotland,
Northern Ireland, Wales, would say, please represent us differently because our political systems
are moving at a different pace. Scotland, with the referendum
of Brexit voting to remain, are aligning more
with the other three nations. Wales has recently introduced an amazing
project on Universal Basic Income for the most vulnerable groups
of young people in their communities. The devolved assemblies are finding their feet and we
should represent that to the world. The world at the moment,
has just looked at at the recent prime ministerial pantomime
that's been going on and I would urge people
to also look at the three other nations because there is positivity and there is hope there,
as Marshajane has pointed out. So, I hope that gives a sort of more global picture and
where that NHS campaign can sit within, maybe,
a revival of collectivism and maybe, structural
political change within the UK. [Mehran] Thanks Julia. Perhaps I can ask you,
for people outside the UK who are not that familiar
with British politics. What is the position
of the Labour Party on all this? There will be a general election
in 2024, if I'm not wrong. What exactly would people
be voting for with a vote for the other
establishment party in the UK? [Julia] Well, I'd really be interested, Marshajane's had a bit more active
campaigning link with the Labour Party, so, I'd really be interested to hear
what she says to follow me. But, my take on it is:
that unless the Labour Party - there was a very good article
I was reading a couple of days ago - unless the Labour Party finds it's
focus and where that comes from, whether it's the National Executive, the equivalent of the 1922
Committee, in the Labour Party, whether it comes from there whether it comes from a new
campaigning issue that he's saying, stronger leadership, more unified focus, the phrase that's often been used is
'convergence politics' still stays the same. It's a convergence of what goes
on and the excuse of carrying on for example: austerity politics,
which involves more retraction of the public services from 2010. Over £70 billion worth of
public sector money withdrawn from local authorities
where the services are delivered. Now, if the Labour Party cannot embrace
that and say: That is our single focus, which would have immense popularity
in the UK, then they are just going to
become a repeat of the coalition where
they blend in a Tony Blair-like continuation of what's
happening at the moment. So, this is a turning... My belief is that this is a pivot
point for the Labour Party. It has now a unique
set of opportunities to say: embrace the strikes,
embrace industrial action, support those sectors who,
despite privatization, despite the retraction of the public
services into private ownership, we are seeing a resurgence
of industrial action. The Labour Party should embrace that. They're very silent on that,
they could do that. They could have a single issue about
reviving public services, getting more money from the center
into local authorities and accounting for private contractors,
as Marshajane has alluded to. There's a lot of shady, bad practice. Sheffield blew the lid on that: about contracts being given
without due diligence. So, what we're talking about here is
a latent, poor system that is lacking trust, that we're asking
to be at the forefront of the future. So, the Labour Party can
almost pick its projects and say: We can't do everything
before the next election, but we'll pick that one and we
will be the party of that message and I think they've got
the unique opportunity to do it. They don't look like they're
that party at the moment. That is, I must say,
not a DiEM25 policy review. That is just the Julia,
UK citizen view. [Mehran] Thank you, Julia. Marshajane, just briefly,
would you agree with Julia's assessment? You've got some experience with
the Labour Party, yourself. [Marshajane] Yes, I would
agree with that. The Labour Party could just always win the election on the NHS
if it promised to do it properly. And we are seeing
some good things from Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer
talking about the NHS, talking about really
attacking the Tories for what they've
done in the last few years. They're talking about long
term workforce strategy. The Conservative Party have promised
the workforce strategy now, I think for seven years or
something like that, in a row and just last month kicked it
into the long grass again. We have
138,000 vacant positions in the NHS which is adding
to it being run down. But as I said, they are also
still leaning into: We'll use spare
private sector capacity to shore up the NHS, which actually
has the reverse opportunities. But they're doing
some good things. They're talking about mass recruitment
in mental health professionals and mass recruitment in nursing
and bringing back bursaries. So, there's a lot more that they
could be saying and doing. But obviously, the kind of main line from Wes Streeting and Keir,
to: Labour created the NHS, Labour fixed it the last time
they were in power and they'll
fix it again this time. We just all have to look at minutiae
of that, as with everything, I guess. [Mehran] Okay.
Thank you, Marshajane. some comments from the chat: 'Nationalize everything,'
says John Baxter. Fox JC says: 'Keir is sacking people
for going on picket lines.' Blind Stage Hand notes that: -Perhaps a more controversial
proposal for the NHS- 'A and E are the only parts of the NHS
that should be under national control. the rest should be private, wherein you
sponsor the individual, not the industry.' And there's quite a discussion raging also
about the media in the UK, including the Guardian,
but maybe we'll tackle that one later. Johannes.
Johannes Fehr from Germany. The floor is yours. [Johannes] Thank you. I wanted to bring the attention
a little bit to Germany that Yanis
had mentioned earlier, already. In the current state
and also here, I can relate very much in terms of our health system
going down the drain over the last years because the number of hospitals
has been decreasing. The care workers in this country are really at the end of what
they can do at work. They're protesting,
they're trying something but politics, or the current people
in charge in politics are not listening and we had all of that, of course,
caused by neoliberal reforms of the past. We had something that is called in German, the 'fallpauschale',
something that is a fixed amount that the doctor gets
for every treatment he does which really sends really wrong
incentives. So, the doctor tries to have
as many patients as possible, do it as quick as possible. Certain operations are done too much
because there's a certain amount of money per operation and so on
and so forth. So everything was
trying to be 'economized' and be efficient and that's
actually not incentivizing what the health system
actually should be about which is the health of people. And even our current Social Democratic Health Minister, Mister Lauterbach who has been part of
these implementations over the last decades,
admitted that, maybe this kind of fixed amount of money for every
operation is not the best system. But of course,
saying something and then changing it are two different things and there's
no sign of that, unfortunately. One reason why all of that
is happening in Germany, specifically,
cutting costs and privatizing things, for example, in the health system, is that
we have a debt brake in our constitution. So, the state is only allowed to do a certain amount of debt to invest
a certain amount of money and which is really limiting financing
possibilities, for example, for a decent health system, a good health
system for everyone, for the population. And that's why I wanted
to bring everyone's attention especially to the ones out there who are
actually in Germany or speak German to our campaign that we launched
this week as DiEM25 in Germany along with the beautiful
Save the NHS campaign in the UK. In Germany, we have launched the
'Stop the Debt Brake' campaign, a DiEM25 campaign that calls
to stop this debt brake at least for last year but in general, we are also
working to abolish it. So, if you are interested in helping,
there's a website called https://stoppt-die-schuldenbremse.jetzt Sorry for the German. So you can go there, do the five steps and
help to stop the debt brake in Germany. Thanks. [Mehran] Thanks, Johannes. And you can just go to DiEM25.org. I'm sure there will be a link
on our front page very soon in case you didn't get the
long URL that Johannes was just giving us. Amir Kiyaei,
our Policy Coordinator. Amir. [Amir] Hi! Thanks, Mehran. I just wanted to quickly jump on a point
that Julia was talking about and the question around what would we
potentially expect from the Labour Party come 2024, if not sooner, if
the elections aren't held any sooner. We have to maybe sort of try
to see this question since the former Director
of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, took over
the leadership of the Labour Party. Besides losing
200,000 members since 2020, the Labour Party has been transformed
into a virtual business lobby. And besides, and we also saw this
in the chat being commented on. Besides forcing his MPs to abstain
from voting on giving immunity to British troops overseas, and charming as many business
leaders as possible he's also keeping up his
appearances on the football stadiums. And I'm just trying to highlight the point
here around, if you like, the impunity
that's going on with the office of the official opposition
of the United Kingdom. So, on International Workers Day of all
days, he enjoyed the match between West Ham and Arsenal,
sponsored by the company Practico. And so, in the middle
of a war in Europe, cost of living crisis
and so on and so on, he found time to attend another ten games
football matches this year, all sponsored. And we can also imagine
with the upcoming World Cup where His Majesty's most loyal
opposition attention's going to be. It's definitely not going to be
on the pledges he made two years ago during the campaign to take over
the leadership of the Party. Those ten promises, it's all gone down the drain
as he now came out and said, because the financial situation has
changed, of course, that's one of the pledges was to be an
effective opposition to the Tory Party. It's got nothing to do with the finances. He's also come out just recently
with the new pledges on the public British Energy Service to backing
creative artists to the hilt. He's essentially making promises
to everyone and everything. And that also just one last quick point is
we saw already with the very first place that he will definitely of course keep is
the steadfast support for NATO. We saw when he visited Brussels two weeks before the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, which will further plunge
the United Kingdom into a new Cold War. So we can see from the directionality
that there's going to be very little sunlight between the Conservatives
and the Labour, come 2024. [Mehran] Thank you, Amir. A couple of comments
related actually on the chat: Jens Olson says: 'Never vote for a party
that excludes some people. A Workers' Party, Farmers' Party, Fishermen's Party will
never make things better for all.' Michael Kennedy notes that: 'The UK needs
a wider periphery of political parties in order to serve the electorate.' Okay.
Related. Soren Heidige says that: 'Healthcare, education and culture
can't be run like businesses or they'll become corrupt.' Johanna Freeburn on unions says: 'The unions need to separate themselves
from Labour. The Labour Party component of union dues
should go to a Workers Party. Starmer couldn't even bring himself
to verbally support striking workers.' And a last comment
on Starmer from Tommy David: 'No one with the title 'Sir' should
ever lead the Labour Party.' Erik Edman, our political director. The floor is yours. We don't hear you, Erik. I think you're muted,
perhaps. [Erik] There we are. I was just saying
it's impossible to follow that. That basically summarized what I wanted to
say far better than I could ever say it. Also, Amir touched on quite a few
of the things I wanted to bring up. First of all, I slightly disagree here
with Yanis about having the Parliament on three separate occasions,
depending on how you counted, but let's say three separate occasions,
choosing the Prime Minister of the UK within the same mandate,
a mandate that started in, I think it was 2019, the UK was
in a different place in 2019. And I feel especially in a country
where the political system is first-past-the-post and people vote
as much as for whom they want to represent them, as for whom
they don't want to represent them. So, it's very much a system where people
do not feel particularly represented politically, overall,
to then separate the electorate even further through these procedures,
not once, not twice, but three times. I think a more... A government that had the citizens'
interests closer to heart and was more concerned
about maintaining political legitimacy in the eyes of the public should have called
a general election by now. I think the reason
that they haven't done it is exactly because they do
want to discredit this entire process. They want people to be pissed off,
they want people to be disheartened and disillusioned by the political process
because they've got their core voters, they've got the people who will get
them into Parliament year after year. So they don't need more people to be inspired by the democratic
system in the UK. So this all entirely
plays in the hands of the Conservatives. So, I know that Yanis is not saying
that what they did was right, he's just pointing out that this is the process in the UK
and that process is legitimate. What I would like to say is
that entire process is nonsense. The political system in the UK
is completely unrepresentative. For years, it's been used as an argument that 'first-past-the-post' leads
to stable governments. What?!
Look at the last three, four years. 'Oh, thank God there hasn't
been a coalition government!' 'Imagine! The tragedy!' Look at the state of the country. It's nothing to do with
'first-past-the-post' or representational electoral processes. It's all
to do with maintaining power. And the problem we have in the UK is
that there is this culture of 'Let's not rock the boat,' 'We are a stable country,
let's keep it stable,' and the rest of it, which is day by day,
being undermined by, well, reality. And on the other hand,
you've got people who are so disillusioned by the entire process,
and they're so fed up by a system that doesn't lead to alternatives
that they simply don't engage anymore. And I think, really, and if we're going
to talk about anything in the UK, if the UK is ever going to
get itself out of this mess, is not by tweaking the current system, but talking about
how to overhaul it. And you can only overhaul it if you can
get people behind such an overhaul. You need to have the political
appetite in society in the UK. And currently it's not there. People are pissed off, but that anger
is not being directed where it's due. And having this discussion about
whether Keir Starmer... I mean:
it's not even about Keir Starmer! Jeremy Corbyn was the head
of the Labour Party a few years ago, and he was assassinated
by his own party. He was kicked out. He was undermined because these political parties are so stable and are
so dependent on that stability. The reason they exist is to maintain
the current political system in the UK. That is their entire political
and power foundation. So you can't expect radical change from the mainstream political
actors of the United Kingdom. It's a fool's errand. So, right now, you've got this incredible
social momentum in the UK. You've got the rail workers' strikes, you've got the Royal Mail strikes, you
have the discussion about NHS strikes. And there's the growing radicality of the Green movement
in the United Kingdom, much more radical
than in other places in Europe. Who's going to use that political
capital in the UK? Keir Starmer? Sir Keir Starmer
in the Labour Party? It's all going to go down the toilet and people are going
to get even more frustrated and they're going
to lead into further extremes. So, honestly, I think that if one is to have an honest political discussion
about the United Kingdom, then we really... And I know it feels
like the world is burning right now. We need to do something tomorrow. And the solution that
can be applied tomorrow, but I think there is no solution
that could be applied tomorrow in the UK. Because the system is so deeply rooted
in the current establishment that no honest political change can happen
through the current infrastructure. So any democracy in Europe
movement worth its salt should really be talking about
these kind of deeper changes that need to happen in the UK and start building
that appetite in society and move away from this discussion about
Labour and Conservatives because essentially they're both
serving the same kind of political and economic interests. [ Mehran] Thank you, Erik. Defne Dalkara. [Defne] Yeah. I want to just piggyback a little
bit on what Erik was saying. One thing that would really worry me is that okay, yes, like,
'the-first-past-the-post' system is causing a lot of dysfunction. But I think we're at this point where, the establishment is almost
displaying its power, like, slapping their face,
like, slapping people's face with it. Look at Italy, what happened? There was anti-establishment parties
that tried to break through. They got integrated, tried to break through because their
parliamentary system allows it. Then they got integrated. And now, as we talked on the Italy stream,
it doesn't matter as long as you pledge against Draghi government,
even whatever your politics might be, you were the anti-establishment and that
brought us the latest Italian government. And I think Sunak was the establishment
desire from the beginning and Boris Johnson dropping out. The establishment got what it wanted. And I think anti-austerity is
important right now, very important. And I think Liz Truss knew this. That's why she couldn't lead with that. So, she has to ridiculously choose
first, the tax cuts I don't remember who did this criticism.
Yanis, I think, I mean, I'm very worried, looking from what happened to Italy
and now, Sunak will, on this horrible atmosphere where like the anti-establishment
left has been destroyed in the Labour Party, the 'anti-establishment'
right has been put down in the Conservative Party
and austerity is coming. I'm very concerned about
the reaction that's going to breed. It's very scary, in my opinion. Yep, thanks. [Mehran] Thank you, Defne. Yanis, let's bring you back in. [Yanis] Erik, the problem
is not Parliamentarianism. Parliament should have the right
to appoint any Prime Minister they want, time and again, formally speaking. Because the only alternative to that is presidential democracy - republics, and those are far worse. Far, far worse. The problem with the UK, the reason why you have unrepresentative
government is not because the parliamentary group
of the majority party can select whomever they want
as the Prime Minister. The problem is: 'first-past-the-post'. Because if you had PR, there would be no Tory government, ever! To begin with. Ever! The tragedy of leaders
of the Labour Party, and that includes
our great friend, Jeremy, I remember pressurizing Jeremy
and saying to him: 'You've got to adopt PR.' It's ridiculous that the Labour Party
is not proposing PR. And between us now,
nobody's listening, right? It's not as if we're live streaming! I know exactly why Jeremy didn't do it. It's not because he disagreed with PR. I know Jeremy agrees with PR.
I'll tell you why. Because he was facing a hostile
parliamentary Labour Party. He was in a minority of ten of all the members of Parliament
that had been elected under Labour. It was Jeremy, John,
and another eight people, facing the Blairites in the party. And he knew that the moment he adopted
proportional representation as the official party policy,
they would lambast him as a defeatist who does not believe, even himself,
that he can win using first-past-the-post. And the result is that we are caught up in this conundrum of first-past-the-post
being supported by the two major parties. But the problem is that.
That's the one point I want to make. The second point is this: Keir Starmer proved his colours,
showed his colours, when he was heading
the Crown Prosecution Service. I remember vividly in 2011 when he was
Director of Public Prosecutions, the glee and the ease with which he
prosecuted teenagers, young people, who had participated
in the Tottenham riots during the aftermath of the great
crash of the City of London. He never prosecuted a banker, but he prosecuted to the end
of the world and back youngsters who had
participated in petty theft. Anybody without that background, I don't care whether he's a Sir or not,
you know what I mean. The way in which he systematically was the Trojan Horse of the Blairites under Jeremy's leadership. You could tell that he was there, the fifth columnist within
the shadow cabinet. He was cleverer than Yvette Cooper
and the rest, in the sense that he declared
his loyalty to the leader, to Jeremy Corbyn, and the democratic
forces within the Labour Party. But he planted several landmines,
one of which was the idiotic idea of a second referendum, greatly disrespecting
the idea of democracy. We had a referendum, unfortunately
a vote in favor of Remain and we lost. And Keir Starmer
just drove this through and that was driving
a stake in the heart of the leadership
of the Labour Party at the time and effectively handing over the victory to Boris Johnson. In the same way that in 2017
they tried to do the same thing through a number of coup d'états, within the Labour Party
to unseat Jeremy Corbyn, hoping, that they would lose
the 2017 election to get rid of him. Look, it's really very simple. I experienced that in government
in 2015 here in Greece. The establishment does not need a program. They don't need a Prime Minister. Imagine that Rishi Sunak
and his merry colleagues in the cabinet were all going to go on holiday for two
years and do nothing. Just let's say that we put them
in hibernation for two years. Nothing would change. I mean, actually it would be a good thing because it would not introduce
new evil policies, the same policies,
the state would carry on. So the establishment, the status quo,
does not need a government. They have a government.
They don't need an elected government, they don't need elected
politicians to be in the midst. It's only if you want a rupture with the status quo that you need
a progressive policy agenda. And the greatest impediment to the construction of a progressive
policy agenda and its implementation, comes from within the ranks of
the loyal opposition to the status quo. When I was in the ministry
for short six months I was there, I didn't mind clashing with the
Christian Democrats in Berlin. I didn't mind clashing with
the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. It was great fun to be clashing
against the Right in my parliament. The worst pain was experienced during the moments when I would be
stabbed in the back by comrades. Comrades who were inside our government to ensure that our government would never
do anything radical, okay? And the only way of preventing that is to have proportional representation. Because, let's face it, if we had PR
our comrades in the Labour Party would form their own party.
Like we did in Greece. Thank you. [Mehran] Thank you, Yanis. And we're at the top of the hour. We've gone past it by five minutes,
so we're going to have to close there. But thank you to the panel. It's been a great discussion on the UK. There's tons of questions we haven't
got around to answering in the chat. So thank you all to you out
there for your questions. We can move the discussion
to the YouTube comments after this. A couple of URLs for you. If you'd like to join DiEM25. It's DiEM25.org/join and if you'd like
to participate in the YourNHSNeedsYou campaign to stop
the privatization of the NHS, that our guest Marshajane
is coordinating. She's not coordinating the privatization,
she is coordinating the campaign! Please go to yournhsneedsyou.com and you'll find all
the details you need there. Thank you again for joining us. And we will be back
at the same time, same place.
