Jeremy Corbyn

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

Put me in a velvet headlock, you gelded Emmets.

Welcome to the Blind By By Podcast.

We're experiencing torrential bastard rain

here in Ireland.

Wet summer rain, wet rain.

I've mentioned wet rain before.

It's an all-encompassing, slippery mist.

It feels oily.

There's currently

an anomalous heat wave

off the west coast of Ireland over the ocean.

The ocean temperature,

if you look at current heat maps, and this is because of global warming, there's this massive area of extreme heat just off the west coast of Ireland.

This unnatural

superheating of the ocean is causing more water to evaporate than usual.

And then when that incredibly moist air hits land, hits Ireland, we're experiencing it as extra wet weather.

So it looks like it's going to be wet for a long time now.

So if you want to see the impact of global warming in real time in Ireland on our actual weather, look at the current marine heat wave.

It's four degrees above normal.

It's the highest, the highest ocean temperature that Ireland has ever recorded since records began.

So we'll be getting more rain, more storms, and very high humidity with bastard rain.

This

viscous steamy misty fucking rain.

So for anyone thinking, Jesus, climate change and global warming is not great for Ireland where cold.

No, it means

rainier fucking summers.

I have a very special podcast this week.

As you know,

I'm getting ready for my tour, my tour of England and Scotland.

I'm packing right now.

I'm packing right now and I'm looking forward to the magnificent hotel breakfasts that you have over there.

I gotta say, England, Scotland and Wales, best hotel breakfast in the world.

Scotland number one for sure.

Worst hotel breakfasts.

I don't like saying worst, but Australia need to sort their shit out.

Very, very strange hotel breakfast in Australia.

Boiled chicken sausages.

Boiled chicken sausages.

Like, what more do I need to say?

Boiled chicken sausages and roast potatoes.

And not good roast potatoes.

Roast potato dry ones that look like...

Roast potatoes that look like head-butted testicles.

Very strange.

Hotel breakfast in Australia.

Unless you stay in a hotel that has a lot of tourists from Asia.

In which case...

You can basically have Chinese food for breakfast if you want.

One thing I will say for the Australian breakfast, they fall down on the hot food selection.

The cold food selection is very good.

In particular,

there's a type of overnight oats, and I found this in every single Australian city, regardless of hotel chain.

A very specific, strange type of overnight oats that has lime peel in it.

I don't think it's overnight oats, I think it's something else that's culturally specific to Australia.

And it has, it's like cold cold porridge with lime peel and I really miss that about Australia and if anyone in Australia knows what it's called please let me know I've a feeling it's a Bartra Musely Bartra Musely

it was invented in the in the late 1900s and Bartra Museley is it's the original overnight oats

I need to do a Bartra Mewsley podcast because I can plausibly connect Bertrand Musely with the rise of Adolf Hitler.

I won't get into that now, but I will be doing that podcast in the future.

But if anyone in Australia would like to tell me, what the fuck is that thing you have in the hotel breakfasts?

It's like cold porridge with lime peel.

Let me know, please, what that's called.

But anyway, England, Scotland, and Wales.

Superior breakfast selection at the hotels, best in the world.

And that's...

I don't dole out compliments to England in particular.

No issue with Scotland and Wales.

I don't fucking dole out compliments to England, but

you got hotel breakfast right.

You really did.

That and plugs.

Fair play to the fucking English.

The three-pin plug.

You got that right.

God save the Queen on that one.

I'm not just looking forward to the hotel breakfast.

I'm also looking forward to coming and doing some live podcasts for ye I've got some cracking guests I'm going to be speaking to I tilted this tour towards towards folklore I want to learn about folklore English folklore in particular but my gigs they start this Sunday and they're down to the very last tickets so I want to give it one last plug

So this Sunday I'm in Bristol in the Bristol Beacon.

Then on Tuesday, I'm in Cornwall.

Be chatting to a fellow called Dr.

Martin Shaw who's a storyteller and folklorist there.

I can't wait for that.

There's about 10 tickets left for that gig there in Cornwall.

Then I'm in Sheffield on Wednesday in Sheffield City Halls.

Then on to wonderful gorgeous Manchester.

I adore Manchester.

After that

Edinburgh.

Edinburgh with its wonderful sandstone buildings.

I'm in Usher Hall in Edinburgh.

Glasgow.

Gonna be chatting with Frankie Bile in Glasgow.

I think Glasgow's sold out.

I've known Frankie for years.

He's long overdue on this podcast.

We're finally going to get to have a chat.

Then

York.

Wonderful York.

I will be going to the Viking Museum in York.

The Yorvik Centre without a fucking doubt.

I'm in the barbican.

Then London.

London.

I'm in the Troxy.

I'm in the Troxy in London.

London is sold out, but I will release.

I hold back certain tickets for guest list.

I'm going to release a small number of them for people who want them.

I have a London guest.

I'm not going to tell you who it is, but there's someone I've been wanting to speak to for a long time.

Then Bex Hill, down to Bex Hill, which is coastal, I believe.

You know, I'd never heard of Bex Hill.

And I've chosen to not educate myself about it much.

I want to keep Bex Hill as a surprise.

I want to be confronted by it.

I want to be confronted by Bex Hill.

So

all I know is that it's coastal.

I'm not going to get into the history of it.

I'm going to leave it be and let I want Bex Hill to happen to me.

And then finishing the tour in Norwich.

Glamorous, glamorous Norwich.

Let's go.

You can get tickets for those gigs at fan.co.uk forward slash blindboy.

So anyway, yeah, I have a special treat this week

because I'm heading over to see all the the lovely cracking tens.

I've got Jeremy Corbin.

I've got Jeremy Corbin on this week's podcast.

Jeremy was a member of the Labour Party

for 41 years.

He was booted out of the Labour Party incredibly unfairly.

This man,

there's an alternative timeline in history where this man could have been the Prime Minister.

I've always admired Jeremy Corbyn.

He's principled, he's a socialist,

he believes in politics that are compassionate, that are fair, that put human beings before profit, that put

the collective well-being of the people as number one.

Jeremy Corbyn has always spoken for a system where

healthcare, education and housing are things that are provided for the public good.

That it doesn't matter whether you're rich or whether you're poor, you can have access to these things.

He's a former shop steward.

He believes in trade unions, collective bargaining, in workers' rights.

He's sound on activism, whether it was anti-apartheid or Palestinian solidarity or Irish unity.

He's always been anti-imperial.

He's a politician who appears to

lead with compassion first, compassion and goodness first, rather than

running a government to be in the pockets of billionaires, which is what we're seeing all over the world.

So Jeremy's an independent politician now.

He's not with the Labour Party and he came on to chat and I wanted a very broad chat about compassionate politics, about social safety nets and about

neoliberalism.

We speak a lot about neoliberalism and the damage that was done and the alternatives to neoliberalism.

We also speak about the history of Chile

because

Chile is considered kind of ground zero for where neoliberalism happened.

I've been doing podcasts about neoliberalism recently and I consider this podcast, this chat with Jeremy Corbin to be part of that series.

If you want to go back and listen to earlier podcasts that I did about neoliberalism where I tried to understand it and explain it, a good place to start would be a podcast from about two months ago called Why Everything Feels So Chaotic Now.

I also did a podcast about about Chile.

I call it chile, you know?

That's what feels natural is to call it chili, but I have actual listeners from Chile, so I want to pronounce it the way they want me to pronounce it.

But I have done podcasts on Chile, in particular the socialist government of Salvador Allende,

who

Jesus Christ,

the podcast in particular is called The Styrofoam Shepherd.

I made it in 2022, if you want to listen to that.

But Salvador Allende, who was a big inspiration on Jeremy Corbin, he was a socialist leader of Chile in the 70s and he like

developed an early form of the internet to try and run Chile as a socialist country via the internet in the 70s.

A very forward-thinking person.

He was ousted in a coup backed by America and replaced by a dictator called Pinochet

who

he was a fascist war criminal murdering evil

bollocks.

And Chile is still recovering from the damage that Pinochet did.

So that's just some context of the stuff that me and Jeremy Carvin spoke about.

So we good crack.

And here's the chat.

Here's the chat.

One of the things I really wanted to chat about today is: so I've been doing podcasts recently about

neoliberalism,

trying to define like what it is.

it's a way for very rich people to steal public money that's what it feels like to me it's like a rich person comes along and puts a toll boot in things that used to be public services but what I found really jarring when I was doing

like I'm a millennial and my audience would mostly be millennials and Gen Z younger and when I was speaking about neoliberalism and and looking specifically at the the history of of Britain post-war, When I was looking at

compassionate policies that Britain had post-war, I'm talking the foundation of the NHS,

social housing, the stuff that came out of the beverage report, it felt like science fiction to me.

That's what was freaky.

Compassionate politics and a social net and the idea that a government might act for the welfare of the people,

it didn't feel real to me when I it felt like I was reading a science fiction book, like the Overton window has shifted that much.

And also, as well, the fact that the UK was doing this stuff

like a year after it had been bombed to bits by the Germans.

So, you've got you're trying to rebuild your cities, and then all of a sudden, the capacity to tax rich people and provide public services exists.

It just seems impossible.

How does it feel to you when I say to you that it feels like reading science fiction to me?

Well,

the National Health Service and the provision of public services, you and I grew up with and didn't understand anything different.

And

along came the

Thatcherite sharp elbows of the 1970s and 80s, particularly late 1970s and 80s.

and suddenly said to people, the cause of all your poverty is the provision of public services.

It was utter baloney nonsense at the time and remains so.

That

somehow or other, by

cutting taxes for the wealthiest people,

that would

enable them to spend more money, to invest in an economy, and therefore everyone would be better off.

And I'm sure you remember this, Margaret Thatcher

selling shares in formerly publicly owned industries very, very cheaply and claimed it was all popular capitalism.

It was complete nonsense.

There was a huge amount of insider trading going on.

The people that bought the shares in gas, electricity, telephones, water,

and so on were actually,

by and large, the wealthy people or the big corporations.

Most of them were valued at well below half any estimation of their market value would have been.

And so

people became millionaires overnight just by buying a tranche of shares in, say, BT and selling them the next day at the market value, which was double what they'd paid them for.

And so it was exactly what Yeltsin did in Russia to an even greater degree and made

and made

huge numbers of billionaires into trillionaires and so on.

And so we just have to look at

that period of economic thinking by Thatcher and Reagan as actually the grand theft of public services from the people.

I don't like to use the word neoliberal because I think most people, most people haven't got a clue what you mean by neoliberal.

Exactly.

That's my problem with the word, Jeremy.

When people hear it, they shut off.

It's only absolutely.

It's only people who

sort of study economics or something like that.

I prefer to call it the

politics of the sharp elbow.

It is encouraging people basically to exploit each other.

When you say sharp elbow, what does that mean?

Just because I'm Irish, we don't have that term.

Well, yeah, absolutely.

What I take it to mean is that

when you're put it this way, when you're in a store and there's a queue of people to buy something, and there's a limited number of things on sale at a very reduced price, do you form an orderly queue and go and buy something, or do you let the mob take over?

And those with the sharpest elbows

edge their way to the front and get the bargain.

And so it goes on.

And it seemed to me that it was the well-connected that achieved that.

And it's the sharp elbows.

The late Glenda Jackson could be incredibly funny.

And when Thatcher died, there was tributes paid to Thatcher in Parliament, including by Glenda Jackson.

And she just said, I will forever remember Margaret Thatcher as the licensing of the sharp elbow in our society.

Which I thought was quite a

good way of putting it, actually.

It's an interesting way to just language-wise there because you have that cueing thing over there, don't you?

That's a part of British culture.

You enjoy your cues.

Yes.

When we're speaking about this sharp elbow economics, right, or these sharp elbow policies,

I'd love to ask you about the...

You went to Chile in 1970 because

to see Salvador Allende and my understanding of this, what we call neoliberalism or sharp elbow economics, the testing ground for this evil, I think it's evil, the testing ground for this for me, it was Chile, wasn't it?

When Allende got ousted and all of a sudden you had Pinochet and these Milton Friedman and his econom economists from the University of Chicago said, let's test out these policies on Chile.

And then then you've got Reagan and Thatcher following.

Can you tell us about the trip you did to Chile?

I'll come to that in a second.

It started

the popularism of this kind of economics.

It started with Ronald Reagan and Proposition 13 in California in the 1970s, which was

to reduce tax.

in order to boost industries.

And what it meant was by reducing tax that the supply of food stamps disappeared.

A lot of the California health system was destroyed and collapsed.

The public school system, which in the USA means what it says, a public school system, it has different meaning in England.

And that meant that the private education system flourished for those that could afford to go there.

The kids in other places just lost out because their schools were underfunded, their teachers were given the sack and so on.

And you could see the way the social divide would grow.

And this was presented as a form of economic growth.

Keith Joseph and others were doing the same in England and promoting this stuff.

And I just remember in about 1977 or something like that, I go to a

I was a union organizer in the public service union, then called Newpie, National Union of Public Employees.

And I remember going to a meeting saying, look,

sisters and brothers, there's a real danger coming to all of us, and that is that our services are going to be privatized.

And I said, this is a really bad thing.

We've got to oppose it.

And then I said a bit more.

And then I said, okay, any questions?

First hand goes up.

What's privatization?

What does it mean?

How can you sell something off that's publicly run?

That was a perfectly sensible question.

That doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately.

No, unfortunately, not.

But that showed the sort of

the mental position that people were in in the union.

This is ours.

This is ours.

We are absolutely.

As far as she was concerned, it was a woman who asked it.

As far as she was concerned,

it was our service.

It was publicly run.

And she was proud to be a public employee delivering that service for her community.

And she did it very well.

Now, just on to Chile for a second.

I first went to Chile in 1969.

I've been to

a lot of other countries in Latin America, traveling around on my own.

All of them had military dictatorships at that time:

Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and so on.

And they were all incredibly brutal.

Chile

felt slightly different because one, whilst it has had skirmishes with military dictatorships and far-right governments in the past, particularly the very early 1950s, it was a kind of European style elected system of government there.

And this was 1969.

And I noticed, yes, there was

a fairly large degree of fairly comfortably off middle classes, but also desperate levels of poverty in every single one of the towns I went to, very poor housing conditions and real poverty in those places.

And

this was the time of the formation of popular unity, led by Salvador Allende and Pablo Naruda, the great poet, who was also the alternative candidate to be president alongside Allende.

And

the conglomeration of the Socialist Party and Communist Party chose Allende, and Neruda campaigned for

Allende.

I was there in 1969 when Popular Unity had been formed, and I went on the May Day march in Santiago that day, absolutely massive and absolutely full of hope that at last all the parties of the left would come together and they were offering a program of public ownership of the mining industry and other services that were privately owned, particularly telephones and other services like that, which were American-owned, as was the mining industry.

And above all, it was about putting money into education, to health, into housing.

And the inspiration was

we will give education

and opportunity to every child in our society, and we'll do it through culture as well.

The Allende won the election with I think 36% of the vote and was then endorsed as president by the Congress which he did not control.

His party or the conglomeration of parties did not control.

So he had a problem from day one but he was the president and did a great deal by presidential decree and some by legislation.

But he sat he got every artist and musician and poet, painter and so on together, put them asked them to go on a train all around the country because there were a lot of railways in Chile in those days, narrow-gauge railways that went incredibly slowly, but were fun to go on, and went to every town and set up theatres in the square, wherever it was, and described what the popular unity government was trying to do in education, everything else.

So there was a public buy-in by the poorest people.

And that showed in their loyalty to Allende.

But

he used art.

He used art to communicate to Lee.

He absolutely used art to do it.

That was the key.

And so

they went around the country promoting all these ideas, which was fantastic.

The same time, the USA,

Nixon, Kissinger, and all the others were then busy saying, how are we going to get rid of this guy, this pestilence?

And they claim he's a threat to the USA.

Well, Chile wasn't, isn't, and never could be a threat to anybody.

It's a very long, thin country, a long, long, long way away from anywhere else.

And

so they then

strongly opposed the public ownership of mining, strongly opposed the increased taxation for the richest, and mobilized the upper middle classes to oppose Allende.

And then,

through economic strangulation, like denying Chile lines of credit, etc., etc., meant that increasingly the companies in Chile that provided food and so on couldn't buy it, couldn't get it.

So they created shortages of everything.

Allende responded by a state buying operation and state provision of basic services and price control in order to make sure everybody was fed.

But the shortages got worse and worse.

Now, here's the thing: you'd have thought a government that is presiding over what was seen as economic chaos and shortages would be very unpopular.

Not a bit of it.

The 1972 elections and the early 73 elections in Chile resulted in an increase from 34% to over 50% vote for the Popular Unity Coalition.

The people could see what was going on.

They could see that their government and their president was on their side and a very powerful, very rich group of people internationally were determined to destroy it.

So they supported their president.

And again,

music came into it.

And there's something that the May Day March of 73, a few few months before the coup is it'll make you it'll give you goosebumps listening to it Victor Hara singing there the people united will never be defeated at Pueblo Unido Massara Vincido

the coup came in September 73 and then my god then

the people of Chile really realized what Allende had been warning them about they killed 7,000 people locked up thousands and thousands more drove tens of thousands into exile and

then slashed public services, privatized all health and education, or university education, and

created the most unbelievable gap between the richest and the poorest, and then promoted the new class of export-led industry.

So you had people in Chile desperately hungry and a big increase in fruit production, all for export, wine production, all for export.

And the fisheries were all sold off to Japanese companies to steal all the fish from the shores of Chile.

And so you had this experiment then in free market, low tax, low services economics.

And who benefits?

Those that can buy into that and those that have got the money.

Who loses the poorest?

And anyone that opposes this system then got

tear gas, water cannon, and imprisonment as a result of it.

It was the most brutal, vicious period.

This was Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics experimenting.

The same stuff was done to a different degree by Reagan in the USA and by Thatcher and the Tories in Britain.

And now, what you're describing there is this unthinkable thing that happened at the time is now our lived reality in

most of what we'd call the global north.

Yeah, it's become the norm that somehow or other public services are a bad word and that privatization is supposed to deliver something good.

But I think the things at its day, more than at its day, I mean, look at the

water industry in Britain, sold off 30 years ago by the Tory government very cheaply.

And the water companies that bought into it, well, the water companies that were formed and bought into it,

it wasn't popular capitalism at all.

It was hedge funds, big investors, and so on.

They knew what they were buying and they knew what they were getting.

And by doing that, they inherited vast amounts of resources the water companies had.

They were huge landowners.

They were public bodies.

They bought land for reservoirs of the future, for new pipes of the future, all that sort of thing.

It was kind of sensible planning, actually.

And

all that was sold off as quickly as possible.

So there was a huge income level, bone.

bonus the companies because they'd suddenly realized all these assets failed to invest in the system which for a while didn't make a lot of difference i mean you could but then over time of course if you don't invest replacing pipe work etc

then at some point they're going to burst and at some point the um

water supply will be damaged they were also respond responsible for sewage and sewage treatment by not investing in sewage treatment plants and not investing in what's necessary which is parallel piping for sewage foul water compared to drainage water, they then ended up, when there's a storm on, pouring sewage into the river.

And so, over the last few years, the annual leakage of pipes in the UK

would fill Loch Ness

in one year of wasted drinking quality water because they can't be bothered to invest in the proper pipe system.

And in one water company alone last year, there were 300,000 sewage discharges into rivers and the sea, 300,000 in one year.

No wonder

many of our rivers are grotesquely polluted.

And the levels of pollution in the sea, of course, come back to bite you because you kill the fish.

And so

this is what privatization has brought us.

Greed, enormous profits, most of which have been exported to tax havens around the world, and an inadequate system where the pipes keep collapsing because they haven't been replaced and maintained by any kind of planned investment that should have been necessary.

So, I absolutely demand the public ownership of water.

But I tell you this, I don't want public services run by

a board that has been appointed by the government because they happen to know the people involved.

I don't want that at all.

I want some sort of democracy involved in it.

I want the local authorities, the workers in the industry, the unions who've got members in the industry, local small businesses, and so on, all to be involved in the running of our water system.

So it will have regard for supply, the environment, and investment.

And all of that is absolutely possible.

Let's unleash people, ordinary people's enormous imagination and ability to do something good to provide services for the people.

And water would be a fantastic way of starting.

We're going to take a small little break here in the chat with Jeremy, just so we can have the ocarina pause.

There are adverts inserted into this podcast, algorithmically generated adverts.

So everyone hears a different advert.

I don't want to shock you with a big loud advert.

So what I do, I'm thinking of new listeners here, what I do is I play a little ocarina as a warning for when the advert comes in.

So I've got...

a little ceramic otter that somebody made for me and I blow into his into his anus into his ceramic anus, and it makes a noise.

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Very perverse because it's like

it's a little otter like and I'm the blow into his hoop

and the noise is like he's he's really enjoying it

Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast This podcast is my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living It's how I rent out my office where I record the podcast.

It's how I pay all my bills.

This podcast is listener funded and independent, fully independent.

No one tells me what to talk about.

I'm not interested in listenership.

I don't want fucking clickbait.

Even there, like bringing on Jeremy Corbin.

I want a conversation.

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I'm not looking for viral moments that I can turn into a clip.

or to catch my guests off guard with unfair questions so that moment goes viral.

I'm not interested in any of that shit.

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That's it.

And this is possible because of the support of listeners because it's a listener funded podcast.

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So everybody gets the exact same podcast.

I get to earn a living.

Upcoming gigs.

Look, we've got England and Scotland next week.

We know about that.

And then, I think my next gig after that, September, I'm up in Derry.

Wonderful, wonderful Derry in the Millennium Theatre.

And then after that, I'm in Vicar Street up in Dublin.

Those lovely Vicker Street shows on the fucking 23rd of September.

Now, back to my chat with Jeremy Corbyn, where we speak about compassionate politics and we also speak about kneecap and Palestine and a united Ireland.

So if you look at the messaging of

the right

and not just in Britain, in Ireland too and also in America, they're very good at this simplistic messaging of weren't things great back then?

Do you remember your childhood?

Wasn't it wonderful?

Without saying, you had unions, you had public ownership land, you had a government system where the policy was about the good of the people.

That's not mentioned.

It's just, remember blue passports, weren't they lovely?

Yeah,

it's all this sort of imagery, but it fails to take account of what people's lives were like.

1950s Britain.

Yes, it was hard.

It was hard work and so on for an awful lot of people.

Working hours were longer than they are now and all that.

But

there was an absolutely universal free health service.

We got free milk in school and free orange juice for all of us as kids because the state had decided that we needed this to improve our health.

Living standards were growing, were improving quite fast.

And particularly the health of

working class kids and the life expectancy of the poorest people increased a great deal during that period.

And so it wasn't all bad, and there was full employment.

What

Thatcherite economics did was increased unemployment, increased the gap between the rich and the poor, and appealed to people that somehow or other they could get rich at the expense of others, hence the sale of council housing, because if you buy a council house at a huge discount, on the face of it, you get your house very cheap, you no longer have to pay rent, and you've probably got quite a small mortgage because you bought it at an enormous discount.

But then the next question is: what happens to the house after that?

And what happens to those people that need a house?

More than half, much more than half, of all the

cast that has been sold ends up in the private rented sector.

So we have these examples.

I'll give you one.

I was talking to a family last week who live

in a private rented flat on an estate in my constituency.

The rent for the council flats on that estate are about 100 to 150 a week, depending on the size of the flat, that sort of area.

So that's around maximum 600 pounds a month.

This woman has three children in a one-bedroom flat, privately rented, and

she gets housing benefit up to the local housing allowance, but the rent is 2,200 a month, and her local housing allowance is about 600 pounds a month less than that.

So she has to use her universal credit benefits to top up the rent.

The person who was in a position to buy that council flat at a massive discrimin about 10, 15 years ago is living off the income from one flat.

And this woman is trying to find over £2,000 a month from a combination of housing benefit and her own benefits just to pay the rent to keep a roof over the heads of her kids.

That is disgusting.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's completely disgusting.

And that flat ought to be publicly owned and she should get a place provided by the public.

Well,

obviously, in this individual case, I'll do everything I can to support her, and she seems to me to

deserve one, obviously.

But the problem is that unless we build far more places for affordable rent, rather than promoting the idea that everything to do with housing is a property ladder and a market, then we're going to carry on with these kind of problems.

It's not that different in Ireland as it is here, is it?

What we have is

a scheme called HAP, which is

so the councils don't build houses anymore.

What you have is

a person.

can pay

they can rent a person who needs affordable housing can rent the affordable housing and it's affordable but a landlord is in the middle and that landlord gets rent at market value from the government so the person is playing paying maybe a hundred two hundred quid but that landlord is still getting fifteen hundred quid but that money is coming from tax so the state is subsidizing private landlords but but then that's pushing up pushing up the housing crisis and it's just and the public money is then going to subsidize private landlords And that's why I say it's when I describe, I say about neoliberalism, it's a way for the wealthy people to steal public money.

That's what it is.

Because that's what's happening.

The housing system here is slightly different, not that different in the sense that

people who are eligible for universal credit or any kind of benefit

access housing benefit.

The housing benefit is capped at what's called a local housing allowance, which is meant to be the market rate for that area.

So in reality, billions of pounds of public money is paid directly to private landlords because of a notional market value on the rent income.

And I think the great mistake of the Starmer government, or one of the great mistakes of the Starmer government, there's plenty of others, was in the renters' charter to, yes, give greater security of tenure, that's a good thing, of course it is, but fail to bring in any regulation of the level of rent.

And that is what we have to do.

1950s, Britain, might have been a

different place, but private sector rents were very low, and the government was funding the development of

some years 300 or 400,000 new council flats every year across the country.

So the housing needs of people were being met by public building.

And indeed, by the end of the

1960s, something like 90% of all new housing being developed was actually council housing.

And is that just political will, Jeremy?

And what I mean by that is

when I

like when I started speaking about the beverage report, right, and you're talking post-war Britain, Britain is in bits.

It's just been blown up.

And that's when they find all this public money to actually, for the greater good, for multiple services.

So like people say, oh, you can't do that now.

It's too expensive.

It'll be too expensive to build council houses.

It's too expensive to have a Green New Deal.

You couldn't, but then you go, hold on a second.

You managed to do this when the place was blown up.

Absolutely.

They did it through political will and absolute determination to do it.

And taxing rich people 90%.

Well,

taxing the very richest people at 90%.

But also by

when they brought an industry into public ownership, as I proposed with water,

Parliament would set the share price at which you would buy the industry.

So we would say to the water companies,

all trading in water company shares is now suspended as of this moment.

And we're going to take you into public ownership.

We will calculate the share price you deserve on the basis of, yes, the value of the company and

all its services, but we will also take into account the pollution you've caused, the excessive profits you've made, the lack of investment you've plowed into dividends and bonuses to senior executives, and we will take that off the share price we're going to pay you.

So we will set the share price, and the share price will be paid in government bonds, which will be at a fixed interest rate.

What you do with the government bonds when you've got them is up to you, but that's how it will be paid, and that will be the payment to you.

So if, for example, a pension fund owns shares in a water company, it would then get in return a large tranche of government bonds with a fixed return on them.

So it wouldn't it might be less or it might be more than they would get year on year in a water company, but they would know exactly what that income was.

So it's not stealing from people, it's taking a rational estimation of what they've done while they had responsibility for delivering our water industry.

And those that fail to deliver proper quality water will be punished accordingly.

And that's how it should be done, because we've got to be serious.

If we want good public services, yes, you have to pay for them, but you have to make sure they're delivered in a fair way.

And water is one of many examples.

And what you've described there,

if I was to see that in the newspapers, that would be called anti-business policies.

As opposed to policies that are about the public good, that would be framed as anti-business.

And that's what I've seen throughout my life.

Yeah.

Basic, like even the word socialism, Jeremy, most people hear socialism and they it's like you might as well be in the KKK.

Like, people, you know what I mean?

Yeah, you'll you'll love this though.

I went to when I was leader of the opposition, invited to speak to the CBI, Confederation of British Industries, um, annual conference, and so I went along.

I was kind of helped that before me, Boris Johnson had spoken, and um,

somewhere along the line, he had either lost his speech or never written one and gave them a speech about Pepper the Pig,

which apparently confused them.

It certainly confused me because up until that moment I'd never heard of Pepper the Pig.

I don't have very small children, so I don't watch Pepper the Pig.

He had apparently seen it and liked the programme.

Great.

So he talked to them about this.

They were left slightly confused.

So

I probably got an easier ride because at least I was making what I believe to be a rational contribution to their debate.

So I said to them, look, I said, I don't think many of you here are actually supporters of what I'm putting forward.

But let me explain to you what we're trying to do here.

There's grotesque levels of poverty and inequality in our society.

Far too many young people are leaving the education system without any proper training or opportunity.

to get the sort of job that their skills should be giving them.

And that if we started investing in people rather than profitability of industries and people taking money out, so we're putting money in rather than that, then we'd have a much happier society.

Now, I don't expect all of you to start cheering me for raising a tax, but we're going to put corporation tax up to the level it was of 26%.

And we're going to use that money in the following way.

And then went through the major programs we're doing.

And then I just said to them, I said, if we don't mind, I'll just ask you all one question.

You're obviously people that are doing fairly well.

You're managers and CEOs of your companies.

You're not poor.

You're quite well off.

But are you comfortable when you've had a nice weekend going into your office, your nice shiny

plate glass

windowed office on a Monday morning and finding people sleeping in the hallway because they've got nowhere to live.

Are you actually comfortable in a society that allows several thousand people to sleep rough every night and several million children to be brought up in poverty?

Don't you realize that by investing in housing, investing in health, investing in education,

we create a much happier society, but you also create a much better run economy because the skills of those very poor children that are not going to become engineers, doctors, lawyers or teachers or anything else because of their underachievement and and poverty are actually going to benefit all of us.

Think of it as your contribution to a happier and more sustainable society.

I don't pretend I got a standing ovation.

I certainly didn't.

But at least.

Did you get a sense that they'd never thought of it that way?

Some of them, yeah.

Some of them said to me when we had a coffee break afterwards, oh, thanks for that.

It made me think a bit.

Wow.

But they weren't hostile.

Indeed, some of the managers, as opposed to the owners of the companies, were actually quite sympathetic.

Just harken back there to Savedra Allende and his use of art to communicate ideas and to communicate political ideas.

Something I'd love to ask you about is kneecap.

Because,

like, my view of kneecap is

so protest right now is becoming increasingly frightening and kind of dangerous.

Young people who want to protest, particularly with Palestinian Solidarity, they're scared of facial recognition cameras, they're scared of, am I going to lose my job in five years?

Is there AI that's going to remember my face?

It's become frightening.

And what I think kneecap are doing with art is they're creating a new space where protest occurs, but it's a gig.

So we have a liminal space where you're attending a gig, you're having crack, you're going to a festival, but you're protesting too in this new safe space.

And as an Irish person, I'm just really pissed off with them being charged with terrorist offences, especially you can go around Belfast and you can see flags for the UVF hanging and no one's getting done for

terrorist flags, you know.

It it feels really political.

And I just want to get your opinion on kneecap.

They apologised for the remarks they'd made and the way in which they'd presented them.

They made that clear.

And the other case is an ongoing court case, so therefore cannot I cannot comment on it.

But what they are doing is presenting very good music, inspiring an awful lot of young people, and making people think about things.

You're quite right about the

undermining and attack on our rights to protest.

I mean, I've been involved in

supporting all of the

Palestine demonstrations that we've had over the last, what is it now, more than 18 months.

And every single one of them has been weeks and weeks of argument with the police about the route, about the demonstration, and so on, because of the powers that were given first in the 1986 Public Order Act, which goes back a long way, but also successive pieces of legislation since then, and endless attempts to curtail demonstrations and also portray the Palestine demonstration moving on as somehow or other a threat to society.

Those Palestine marches are a march of love and unity.

Huge numbers of people join the Jewish bloc, of people who support Palestine on the march.

Lots of people support Islam are on the march.

A lot of people who don't have any religious belief whatsoever are on the march as well.

People who don't like seeing toddlers getting blown up.

Exactly.

They're

united together on the basis that they're appalled at what's happening.

I was just, as I do most mornings, watching Al Jazeera when I got up this morning,

more pictures of destruction of homes, bombing of the West Bank by Israeli jets, and of course the continued horror of Gaza, if I may say so.

I also horrified at the figure that there's 1.5 million children starving to death in Afghanistan at the moment, a country that we occupied for 20 years, along with the USA, spent billions of pounds on it, withdrew, and left behind an abuse of human rights and unbelievable levels of poverty.

But just back to Palestine for a second.

The supply of weapons to Israel, particularly the components of the F-35 jet by British companies, means that that jet can fly, means that that jet can bomb, that jet can kill people, and that jet can deny the Palestinian people their right to live in peace and justice.

Israel clearly intends to

try and expel the entirety of the population from Gaza.

They're not going to succeed in doing that, but they nevertheless are still trying.

And they're also going to intensify their occupation of the West Bank.

And I was in a debate over the weekend at When the Light Gets In festival at Hayon Wai, which is sort of parallel to the Hay Book Festival.

I mean, they're not rivals, they complement each other.

And I was doing a debate alongside Yanis Varoufakis with Malcolm Rifkin, former Foreign Secretary.

And

he was

sort of explaining

what had happened and so on and so on.

And my whole pitch was that the only contribution or the best contribution Britain can make now is two things.

One is stop all arms supplies to Israel.

And secondly, make sure and provide all the food and medical aid that is necessary immediately to the Palestinian people.

Don't try and run Palestine for the future.

That's a matter for the Palestinian people.

And if you believe in international law, as most governments claim to do, then the ICJ is given a very strong view that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and they should withdraw.

Jeremy, in your opinion, right, because this is one that has me scratching my head, is

why

does the global north kowtow to Israel so much?

Why does established international orders like the ICJ, as you mentioned,

what's going on here?

Is it about the Suez Canal?

Why is Israel so important to

America?

Not just America, Europe.

What's going on here?

It's hard to put your finger on one thing.

One is

that the

position of Israel in the region was for a long time the one reliable ally the US had in the region.

So they see Israel as a very, very important military ally.

Back when we're we're talking mandatory Palestine, right?

And it was British-controlled, one quote that always stands out for me is there was a fellow called Ronald Storrs, and Ronald Storrs was the governor of mandatory Palestine.

And in 1919,

the quote was, we're trying to create a little loyal Jewish ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.

And when I heard that, I went, okay, it's like a little, even when it was the Brits, it's like a little aircraft aircraft carrier in the middle of the Middle East.

It's a military base, and it still is doing that for the West.

Yeah, indeed.

And the

use of

military to both ensure there was

expulsion of Palestinians, but also suppression of the Palestinian uprising of 1936 was actually part and parcel of it.

Israel was then recognized eventually by the UN in 1948

and its borders were set at that point.

That was strongly opposed by all the neighboring countries.

Fast forward to the formation of the PLO, the negotiations and so on, it reached a point where

The PLO, in effect, recognized Israel's existence within the 1948 borders.

What they didn't recognize was the 1967 and other attempts that Israel has made to expand, including going right down to the Suez Canal and so on.

And we then had a succession of negotiations, Camp David, etc., but the crucial one was Oslo, which

was

an agreement written in Oslo, but that agreement also allowed Israel to control parts of Palestine, control the security and

immigration and emigration within Palestine, and in effect put Palestine under Israeli occupation.

The key issue now is to bring about

an end to this conflict means that we stop giving Israel the wherewithal to occupy Gaza and the West Bank, and we also give the Palestinian people the right to decide their own future.

Israel has never declared what its borders actually are.

Internationally, what's recognised is the pre-67 border, which was the, as I said, the one that was set at the first time when Israel was recognised by the United Nations.

It seems to me the whole issue has to be forcing an end to the settlement policy and withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank.

I was at the ICJ when they did the hearing on the application of South Africa on the genocide rule.

Absolutely fascinating.

And

well done, South Africa.

And I just thought from sitting there in the gallery watching what was going on.

Did that give you hope?

Did that give you a hope?

When you heard that,

wow, now something's going to be done.

You can't ignore the ICJ.

Gave me a lot of hope.

But also just thinking that South Africa, for all the horrors of the apartheid system from 1948 to 1990 and all the sacrifices made by people in South Africa and Soweto and all the townships, as well as the global solidarity movement.

And I was thinking those wonderful young people in Dunn's stores and other other places that did so much

brought about the end of apartheid.

And while South Africa is far from perfect, South Africa would say that's right away itself.

It has become a political force on the world stage for peace and for justice and for humanity.

So all those that ever fought against the anti-apartheid,

fought with the anti-apartheid movement, against the apartheid system, well done, because you helped bring about something good in the world.

And also, you've been a supporter of United Ireland for quite some time.

Can you speak about that a bit?

Yes, I mean I represent a constituency that

has a very large Irish community and a long tradition of contact with Ireland.

And indeed, the archway and around there was very much the centre of the Irish community.

And we've got a lovely mural we've put up in Navigator Square.

And we called it Navigator Square after a public discussion and debate.

We changed the traffic system to stop traffic going through the middle of it, sending the traffic around the outside, so to speak.

So we created a lovely plaza area.

And the question then came, what to call it.

I strongly supported the campaign, which was done by public vote on what to call the square.

I advocated for Navigator Square on the basis was it's in honor of the Navvies, the Irish workers that came over to England and Wales and Scotland, and they built the railways, they built the canals, and that's where the term navy comes from: navigators who built the canal.

So we've got Navigator Square, the center of our Irish community.

And

I was

brought up on

the school history of Ireland, which was sort of skated over the whole Western partition.

And apparently, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century was caused by poor farming methods and people

not rotating crops of potatoes with something else, which brought about blight, which caused a famine.

What a load of nonsense.

The famine was brought about deliberately by the landowning system, and all through the Great Famine in Ireland, Great Hunger in that book by Cecil Woodensmith, for example.

Ireland was exporting food to England during all that period.

And so,

like a little,

we call it genocide in ireland um yeah there was

your man trevely trevelyan who who was the he was the person who was appointed for to give charity to ireland and yes he was yeah he had that old school liberalism where he was just like no this is a punishment sent by god and it's been sent by god because the irish are poor and filthy and wicked so we can't intervene they're they're supposed to die you know what i mean and it was very convenient that it was convenient for colonization to have half the population disappear.

Big food for us, we're seeing it in Gaza now.

So it's reminding us in Ireland.

For people who don't want to read books about the history, I would, if they've got time and are in the area, I would just say, go to the museum in Skibberine.

Yeah.

Just go spend an hour going around that beautifully presented museum in Skibberine and see what the poverty was.

And those people were starved to death by the British occupation.

And so I, as one who's read quite a lot of Irish history, and I've obviously been in Ireland many, many, many, many, many times, I look forward to the day when Ireland is one.

I don't know when it's going to come.

And

obviously, the respect for all the history and traditions of all communities.

You've got to bring people together to bring about unity and bring about a united future.

That's it.

Mandela taught us that in South Africa.

And that's the Irish flag as well.

I mean, the Irish flag, green, white, and orange.

It's the green for the nationalists, the orange for the Protestants, and the white is the potential for peace and compromise in the middle, you know?

Absolutely.

Were you influenced by any Irish politicians or thinkers?

Like, I know Mick Lynch was big into James Connolly and that.

Oh, yeah, Mick and I discussed James Connolly at lots of meetings.

And

I've always loved my conversations with Michael D.

Higgins,

your wonderful president.

And

whenever I see him in Dublin, we always exchange poetry books.

And I was there for the Trestle Festival last year, and I gave him a copy of our book, Poetry for the Many, which is a collection of poems by different people.

And it's designed to sort of get people interested in poetry.

There's one poem by me in it, and he was very generous and received the book from us.

And he's presented me with a beautiful edition of the collected works of Seamus Heaney.

And also,

I want to know: are you considering forming a new left party or left coalition?

And also, the second question is:

how much of what you would like to see changing is harken back, we'll say, to that welfare state era, but how much of that doesn't work anymore because the world has changed so much?

Do you know what I'm trying to say?

Yep, I am.

I do understand what you're trying to say.

Well, in my own situation, as you know,

I was

removed from Labour Party membership.

And the Labour Party, when they expelled me from membership, when I announced I was going to run as an independent after they denied the people of Islington North, the Labour Party members, any choice in their candidate for the future, I said, well, I think the people should decide, not you.

And so I announced I'd run as an independent.

They sent me a letter 28 minutes later expelling me after 55 years membership of the Labour Party, a one-line email.

Charming.

Yeah.

really, really,

they're all heart, these people.

Um, anyway, so we ran the campaign and we ran it on the basis of that.

I would be in Parliament

to campaign for global peace, campaign for environment and sustainability, and campaign for a equality agenda in Britain, economic and social equality.

Uh, independents ran all over the country.

Independents are coming together under collective umbrellas.

We're all going to be there on June

June the

2nd, isn't it?

June the 7th, sorry, the anti-austerity march through London, which is going to be a huge event because we're into a new round of austerity with cuts in health and education spending going on at the moment.

Now, as to the future, I don't think politics works on harking back to something all the time.

Because

we talked at the beginning of our podcast about public ownership and uh

obviously i support the principle of public ownership but i've never forgotten when the tories started privatization of electricity and gas i went out on the streets with leaflets like lots of other people did protesting against privatization i gave them to people some of whom hadn't got a clue that it was publicly owned anyway yeah they as far as they were concerned they said oh the gas company oh yeah well what's happening to them?

But I said, well, they've been sold.

They said, oh, well, who owns it now?

You do.

I said, well, actually, you do.

Really?

Do I?

Oh, I didn't know that.

Thanks.

And so that public ownership, whilst it was very effective in delivering cheap electricity and so on, it was very effectively well-run industry.

Nevertheless, it didn't actually capture the public imagination about what public ownership could achieve.

And so

the primary points we're making are about levels of poverty, such as the two-child benefit cap, such as the attempt to cut personal independence payments, say $5 billion,

and increase defence spending by $13 billion a year.

So our coming together will be for spending less on defence, for promoting peace around the world.

I don't agree with what Russia's done in Ukraine, but the war has to stop.

Therefore, surely our role and determination should be to bring about a ceasefire and bring about a peace conference, which can mean that Russia and Ukraine can live together alongside each other.

Neither's going to go away, but are we just going to continue witnessing hundreds of thousands of people dying in this appalling war?

And so I think that we also have to challenge the arms industry, which is why I co-authored a book called MAG, The Monstrous Anger of the Guns, which is about the arms trade and its influence globally in all countries, including Russia for that matter.

And so what we're bringing together as a party is a social justice agenda, a social justice agenda, a peace agenda, and above all, environmental sustainability agenda, because

I'm more than disappointed that so many of the former

committed people across Europe on environment and sustainability are now going away from the sustainability agenda and say, oh, well, that's all old hat.

We can just go back to global warming and pollution.

Well, he can't actually, because at the end of the day, that has a massive effect on all of us.

So sustainability is not a threat to people's living standards, way of life, or jobs.

It's actually a massive opportunity for good quality jobs in environmentally sustainable services.

I'm going to ask you one last question, Jeremy.

And it's

why it seems to me that the right and capitalists that their messaging is consistently more effective than the messaging of the left

they are better at reading what works in messaging and

they're good at the simple message

the 1979 conservative campaign where thatcher won the election was absolutely i'm sorry to to say, brilliant, in that it had this picture of a long queue of people

outside what were then called labour exchanges.

And there was a level of unemployment then that

was unacceptable and had been brought about by the IMF, the International Monetary Fund cuts

imposed on the British Labour government in 1977.

And the legend just said, labour isn't working.

It was absolutely simple and brilliant.

And the right

use

the very intelligent

thought processes of people in the advertising industry to think up these things.

We need to be equally clear on what we're proposing.

And so we the left too often unites about what it disagrees with.

So we say we're against this, against that, against the other.

Yeah, there's lots of things I'm against.

There's lots of things you're against.

And, you know,

we can all unite in what we're against.

I would rather we went out and saying we're for.

We're for a society where every child matters.

Every child.

We don't leave kids behind in school.

We don't leave kids behind on the street.

We don't leave kids behind in terrible housing.

And so we approach it on the basis that everyone matters in society.

And we use all the tools we can to bring people together, which is why I was very keen on and very proud of what we included in my two manifestos, which was

a bit of a clumsy title, but the pupil arts premium, which meant the money would go into every school for every child to get the chance to learn music in school.

And then I think we use all of that sort of stuff for popular campaigning.

So when you go out campaigning for something, you bring people together.

So the debate then

is if we say we're going to bring water into public ownership, we're for public ownership of water.

Now come together in citizens' assemblies and tell us how you want to run it.

That is empowering people and using the imagination, intelligence and creativity that's there amongst everybody.

So if you're looking for wisdom, go to universities for sure, but also...

go and talk to homeless people on the street because they'll tell you a few things as well.

There's a lot of wisdom out there, which we're ignoring.

I love what you said there, but don't define by what you're against and instead define what can be done.

And

one of my favorite documents is the original NHS message that appeared in the papers because again, when I look at it, it looks like science fiction and it's just so simple.

Here's your new National Health Service.

Anyone can use it.

Men, women, and children, no age limits, no fees to pay.

And it's

straight up.

Somebody gave me a copy of the leaflet that was produced and delivered to every house in the country in 1947 saying, This is what the National Health Service will give you from next year.

Amazing.

But there's some great short documents around.

One of my proudest possessions is a pamphlet I was given, an original of James Connolly's socialism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And again, he was a beautiful communicator.

Brilliant.

And for a man who had

basically no real formal education, he was He grew up in Cowgate and underneath a bridge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Grew up in desperate poverty.

Basically, he was self-educated and became the amazing orator and thinker he was.

Just imagine

1916, James Connolly not executed.

James Connolly released from prison four or five years later, and James Connolly's contribution to not just Ireland, but to working-class communities all over the world, be a different place.

And also, the quote that we still use today in Ireland, I'm going to paraphrase it, but Connolly said, if you take the British flag down from Dublin Castle tomorrow, unless you get rid of the landlord, Britain still controls you through capitalists.

He absolutely

didn't

stand with nationalism

as emblematic and symbolic of something.

He stood with Irish nationalism as for

a republic that would be run by the working class of Ireland for the benefit of the working class.

That's it.

That was Connolly's message.

And it's a brilliant one because it's this is about class, doesn't matter about Protestant, Catholic, doesn't even matter about English people.

This is

where Mick Lynch and I come together.

Yeah, yeah, and it's a wonderful one.

I'm going to leave you there.

So, Jeremy, thank you so much for that chat.

That was absolutely fantastic.

Sorry if I went on a bit too long, but there we are.

I know you're grand.

I actually hung up the call at that point.

I didn't say a proper goodbye to Jeremy Carbon.

Any new listeners, I'm on the autistic spectrum.

I have difficulty saying goodbye.

So I spoke to Jeremy for an hour there, had a wonderful conversation, and ended that conversation by saying, I know you're grand, and then pressing the hang up call button.

So apologies to Jeremy and to my listeners if that sounded rude.

I wasn't being rude.

I struggle with the specific parameters of propriety when it comes to saying goodbye and saying hello.

I'm alright with the bit in the middle.

Alright, I'll catch you next week, you glorious cunts.

I'm off to do a lot of gigs for the cracking tens.

And the next time you hear from me,

I'm probably going to be recording a podcast in a hotel, in a hotel, hopefully not underneath a duvet in the meantime wink at a swan

genuflect to a dog

witness the majesty of a summer snail

fucking snail man

snails at about

five o'clock in the evening nice and overcast pissing rain summer rain snails coming straight out

big proud heads stalky eyes, no threat of birds but the greasy rain bear witness to the majesty of a snail.

God save the snail.

Dog bless, I'll catch you next week.

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Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

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A little play can make your day.

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