00:00:00.000I do think we have a particular view, I mean people say the 1%, I mean I'd probably call it the 0.001%.
00:00:06.000And that isn't just, you know, tech CEO bad guys, it can also be people like Dame Alison Rose, you know, the CEO of NatWest.
00:00:14.000This is really daft, you're talking about how inclusive you are because you've debanked Nat Nigel Farage, you can't even pay men and women the same.
00:00:20.000Are you excited about a Starmer Premiership?
00:00:23.000No, I think we need a political revolution in this country, and I don't mean like get out the bayonets and kill everyone.
00:00:29.000I think we need a profound shift in power, economic, political and cultural, away from London, away from Westminster, towards ordinary people.
00:00:37.000I saw Chávez come to power, and I saw everyone on the left venerate Chávez, venerate socialism, including Corbyn, including people saying this is an example of socialism working.
00:00:50.000And now everybody's moved on and they've moved on to the next project.
00:00:53.000And I guess my question is to you, seeing countries like Venezuela, seeing countries like the Soviet Union, how can you identify with socialism when it's never worked?
00:11:36.000An actual solution-oriented sort of mode of thinking just doesn't sit well with them.
00:11:41.000So, I think lots of people from the left dislike the BBC because they see the fact it's economically liberal.
00:11:46.000Then lots of people from the right see the BBC and they say, well, it's socially liberal.
00:11:49.000And so, I can see both points of view.
00:11:52.000But it is, and because we don't have a successful liberal party in this country anymore, which we did until the early 20th century, it is very much a continuation of that sort of patrician liberalism, which was the liberal party, you know.
00:12:04.000Which, broadly speaking, after it collapsed, kind of becomes a faction within both Labour and the Tories.
00:12:11.000So, the BBC has kind of progressive moments.
00:12:15.000And I'm sure it has, like, journalists who are on the left, for sure.
00:12:18.000But I would say it's a liberal news organisation.
00:12:36.000Although there is increasing conversation about classical liberalism and that is a different thing entirely.
00:12:41.000When you say the BBC is a liberal institution and you're positioning that as a different thing to you, which is left-wing, explain that to people.
00:12:50.000What do you mean? What's the difference? How are these things different?
00:12:54.000So, a really great way of explaining this, I think, is the fact that the BBC, I think it's changed now.
00:12:59.000But they didn't have an industrial relations correspondent. They didn't have a Labour correspondent.
00:13:03.000Or editor, rather. They didn't have a correspondent. They didn't have a Labour editor.
00:13:07.000Which they would have had all the way through, really, to the 1980s.
00:13:09.000Which is somebody whose job is to say, these workers are getting screwed here.
00:13:14.000A thousand people have just been laid off here. Like the P&O story, for instance, right?
00:13:18.000These people have gone on strike. They've got a big pay rise.
00:13:21.000These women are campaigning for better maternity leave conditions at work, etc.
00:13:59.000And I remember during the whole Ngozi-Felani affair, it was covered like it was a terrorist attack.
00:14:04.000When you sort of think there's probably much bigger core issues affecting way more people, which I think is what you're talking about.
00:14:10.000So is your focus basically an old-school class-based approach where you are like, well, the workers who are the majority of the society, they're at the bottom.
00:14:34.000But frankly, you know, the middle class and the working class in this country, we just did a show on this actually with a great guy, Dan Evans.
00:14:41.000You know, we talked about the petty bourgeois.
00:15:16.000I mean, I'd probably call it the 0.001%.
00:15:18.000You know, the economic elite, frankly, who are pro-privatisation with regards to things like water, who fundamentally don't think democracy matters, who contrives sort of Mickey Mouse bizarre issues so that we don't actually confront the real problems in society.
00:15:36.000And that isn't just, you know, tech CEO bad guys.
00:15:40.000It can also be people like Dame Alison Rose, you know, the CEO of NatWest.
00:15:45.000You know, NatWest have all these, quote unquote, progressive inclusive policies.
00:15:48.000And yet, I think the gender pay gap in the organisation was something like 30%, right?
00:17:40.000You know, he ends up in a similar place.
00:17:41.000So, no, not all left-wing people feel the same.
00:17:44.000This is the great thing with the RMT and the strikes we've had, you know, Mick Lynch, who's their chief, the Rail Workers Union.
00:17:54.000I think it's so useful for the average sort of Joe Bloggs, you know, member of the public, to see a guy, you know, who's, you know, bald, late 50s, early 60s, gruff, a Millwall fan.
00:18:32.000That's a profound point because in 2016 and post-2016, that term gammon would have been used for people like Mick Lynch or Eddie Dempsey, who I would have seen as the fulcrum of the left.
00:18:46.000The people who, what I think left wing means, which is people coming out, representing workers, trying to get them a better deal.
00:18:55.000And what I've seen on the left now, and look, maybe it's Twitter amplifying these voices.
00:19:00.000Or somebody going, you know, if you're fat phobic, you're Hitler.
00:19:33.000But I mean, I was quite ripped until about 30.
00:19:34.000And that was definitely because of my dad's body shaming when I was about nine.
00:19:38.000So I sort of got into bodybuilding and, you know, athletics and whatnot.
00:19:41.000But on a serious note, it's that left wing.
00:19:45.000I mean, look, there are lots of things which are right wing.
00:19:48.000There are lots of things which are conservatives.
00:19:49.000There are conservatives out there that want to pull down all the trees and build loads of skyscrapers and, you know, chase GDP relentlessly.
00:19:56.000There are also conservatives out there who want to reintroduce beaver and, you know, rewild things and introduce regenerative farming.
00:20:03.000And I think in a very strange way, they both sit in the same tradition.
00:20:07.000I think you have to be realistic on the left.
00:20:09.000You know, those arguments are on the left because they're taking aim at a form of oppression or antagonism or hatred is a strong word, but you know what I mean.
00:20:18.000And so I think they probably are on the left.
00:20:20.000I don't agree with that proposition, though.
00:20:25.000So the left is a very broad coalition.
00:20:29.000So what can Labour do and Keir Starmer do to hold together this very broad coalition of people who actually think and believe very, very different things?
00:20:40.000Somebody who is a left wing progressive, I mean, it's a cliche in Islington, is going to think very differently to an old school former minor in a town like Darlington.
00:21:02.000You know, they won in what, 60, 64, 66, 74, I think 76.
00:21:08.000You know, so they won repeatedly with their economic base being, you know, organised labour, but also introducing things like the right to divorce, abortion, decriminalising homosexuality.
00:22:47.000The evil Tories are going to be out, isn't that a good thing?
00:22:49.000Yeah, the evil Tories will be out, yeah, great.
00:22:51.000I mean, what's interesting is that Boris Johnson in 2019, at the moment, on, for instance, climate change, was to the left of Keir Starmer right now.
00:23:50.000And, you know, I feel like there's just, this is the most right wing government in history.
00:23:55.000It's like, on the political economy side, it really isn't.
00:23:58.000Like, there's a few, you know, sometimes you'll hear something crazy and, you know, that they release as a press release or as a media message.
00:24:05.000But on the sort of fundamentals, Boris Johnson was to the left of David Cameron.
00:24:09.000These same people had no problem with David Cameron, right?
00:24:12.000And austerity between 2010 and 2016 in terms of how, you know, how it dismantled lots of really core parts of how, you know, this country functions.
00:24:26.000My view is that Labour will be less bad, which is obviously not great.
00:24:32.000And it's probably why people aren't sort of, you know, enthused about a Starmer premiership.
00:24:38.000But equally, I think that's probably why he's going to win over lots of floating Lib Dem Tory voters or floating Lib Dem Labour voters or Tory Labour voters in the Red Wall.
00:24:49.000But fundamentally, I think we need a political revolution in this country.
00:24:52.000And I don't mean, like, get out the bayonets and kill everyone.
00:24:55.000I think we need a profound shift in power, economic, political and cultural, away from London, away from Westminster, towards ordinary people.
00:25:38.000They have actually no substantial politics.
00:25:40.000They're purely a consequence of the two party system.
00:25:44.000We're not, you know, we're not that bad.
00:25:47.000And if you don't like these guys, these other guys can't win.
00:25:51.000How the hell is that a basis for a democratic vote?
00:25:53.000So I just think when you look at the Tories, you look at Labour, you look at the Lib Dems, so much is dysfunctional with first past the post.
00:25:59.000That would be the first one for me, I think.
00:26:01.000I mean, we've had plenty of people on to talk about the problems with first past the post and what a proportional system might mean.
00:26:09.000One of the things it will likely mean is that extremist parties do very well.
00:26:15.000And so I sometimes, and I'm very open to the idea of PR, but I wonder whether people have thought about that.
00:26:21.000But look, I actually, you've raised a few points that I think are bigger than this whole Twitter left-right bullshit that we spend too much time talking about.
00:26:31.000And I want to talk to you about a couple of things where we may agree less than we have done so far.
00:26:36.000One of them is, and I'm glad you said the 0.001%, but this narrative generally worries me because people talk about the 1% or the top this or the top that.
00:26:47.000Look at the statistics. The top 10% of people in this country pay 60% of all the income tax, right?
00:26:53.000And I sort of think, like, I mean, okay, they're rich and we're British, so we have to slag off people who've done well.
00:27:01.000But are they really the bad guys, the people who are earning what would be put in top 10% and probably, like, over 80 grand a year?
00:27:09.000Are they really the bad ones that we have to point our fingers at and go, you're not paying enough tax when they're 10% or providing 60% of the income?
00:27:26.000There could be somebody, look, on 80 grand a year, they've got a couple of kids, maybe the other half, whether it's the wife or the husband, maybe just works part-time for whatever reason, partly because of caring for the kids or whatever.
00:27:38.000But, you know, given what's just happened, mortgage rates, energy, they might think I need to put some away to look after my parents for a few years, my own pension, you know, it doesn't go that far.
00:28:11.000I think it's a problem that in the European Union, we're not in the European Union, in Europe, the most valuable company is LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Moet, Hennessy.
00:29:24.000So when I see them being sort of demonized as the problem, I don't really know that that to me is accurate because I'm not envious of them.
00:29:34.000I'm like, you've done well because you've contributed to other people's lives.
00:29:38.000You've created opportunities for other people.
00:29:40.000You've created a product that other people want to buy or a service or whatever.
00:29:44.000And I am quite uncomfortable with that rhetoric.
00:30:33.000Like you say, you should be making money from selling goods and services to people, starting a business.
00:30:38.000And I think too much of the money and capital and the know-how and the ambition has gone, for instance, in buy-to-lets in this country over the last 20 years.
00:30:45.000But, Aaron, this is where you and I would, and Francis, would agree completely.
00:30:48.000The housing market is completely fucked on purpose, and they refuse to fix it.
00:30:57.000But that's a different issue to the 1%.
00:30:59.000Because, as you say, most of the buy-to-lets are just owned by people who built up some capital in their housing and then bought another flat when they could, or whatever, and rent it out.
00:36:44.000Amazon would be a very good example of this.
00:36:45.000I mean, we had James Bloodworth on to talk about his book which exposed a lot of the practices that these giant multinational corporations are engaging in to drive down their costs.
00:36:54.000And, by the way, you talk about the high street.
00:37:02.000I was just curious because I wonder how we have a productive economy if there is a section of the population who sees anyone who's made any money as a problem, you know.
00:37:12.000And it sort of sometimes feels like that to me.
00:37:19.000I think the problem is is that people talk about the rich and they conflate the Amazons and the Jeff Bezos of this world with the bloke who's maybe a very successful estate agent on 90K a year.
00:39:28.000So yes, it's bad that these people have so much money, but it's what they can buy with that money in terms of political influence, the media, opinion making.
00:39:37.000So if the Koch brothers were just billionaires, fine.
00:39:40.000But it's the fact that they are trying to buy massive political influence in a range of areas.
00:39:45.000They're trying to really, they've tried to basically buy candidates in the past.
00:39:49.000So I think for much of the left, the big problem is political capture by the elite as much as those people being rich.
00:39:57.000If they were just rich and they sort of just, you know, did their thing and enjoyed life, I think we'd be having a slightly different debate.
00:40:04.000But, you know, Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post and then the Washington Post runs something excoriating Donald Trump.
00:40:10.000I can see why the average American voter would say this is kind of screwed up, actually.
00:40:41.000He put one of my relatives under house arrest because he refused to enact Chavez's wishes, which would make the country poorer.
00:40:51.000And he was put under house arrest until he complied.
00:40:55.000I saw Chavez threaten journalists until the point my cousin had to leave because he didn't know at one o'clock in the morning there was going to be a knock on the door and he was going to a prison called La Tumba.
00:41:07.000I mean, I don't need to explain what that is.
00:41:09.000And I saw everyone on the left venerate Chavez, venerate socialism, including Corbyn, including people saying this is an example of socialism working.
00:41:19.000And that was a moment for me where I fell out of love with the left because I was trying to say, hang on, this isn't what you think it is.
00:41:33.000But people didn't care. And now everybody's moved on and they've moved on to the next project and saying they're socialists.
00:41:40.000And everyone in my country is screwed, to be honest with you.
00:41:45.000And I guess my question is to you, seeing countries like Venezuela, seeing countries like the Soviet Union.
00:41:53.000How can we, how can you identify with socialism when it's never worked?
00:42:02.000Well, that's an interesting one. Let's start with Venezuela.
00:42:04.000So I think, I think South America is incredibly unique.
00:43:47.000And the Russian people and the peoples of the former Soviet Union, I think, can be proud of certain accomplishments such as the first person in space.
00:43:55.000I think it's an incredible technological achievement.
00:43:59.000I think you should be very proud of that.
00:44:02.000That wasn't so much a technological achievement, but yeah.
00:44:05.000Well, no, but you know, you say that, but there's some really interesting stuff about this, about the ability of the Soviet Union after 1940-41 to actually start developing incredible tanks, incredible military technology.
00:44:21.000Actually, it's the other way around, interestingly.
00:44:23.000So the Soviet Union, people don't know this because the Soviets got overrun in 41 and early 42.
00:44:29.000What actually happened is the Soviets had far superior technology in the early period, but then they got outpaced by the German military machine as the war went on.
00:44:38.000So by the end of the war, the kind of technology the Germans had is the basis of all our technology now.
00:44:45.000They had cruise missiles basically in their thousands, et cetera.
00:44:48.000And there's a reason the Soviets lost 20 million people in World War II.
00:44:52.000But I mean, look, your point, every society has positives in every way of structuring it.
00:44:58.000I guess the point that Francis is making about it not working is in the Soviet Union and in Venezuela, the argument would be about socialism that it is a way of thinking about the world that is so unnatural to human beings.
00:45:11.000The way that we evolved to think about our own interests and the interests of others in the Soviet Union.
00:45:16.000As you know, the idea was that you were supposed to put the needs of the state above those of your own family that it takes putting people in Latumba or it takes people in being put into gulags to achieve that dream in which Pavlik Morozov gives up his parents to the state.
00:45:35.000Because it's such an unnatural way that doesn't really apply onto how human beings are wired.
00:45:40.000If we were mole rats or ants where we were genetically linked, that might be easier to do.
00:45:45.000Do you see what? That's kind of more the argument.
00:45:47.000I think the 20th century has a series of experiments like this from Nazi Germany to the USSR to the Khmer Rouge, where you have this incredibly, I mean, I don't even think there are economic projects, extremely cultural projects and extremely innovative as cultural projects.
00:46:06.600So like the idea that a human being is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and look, I don't, I don't think that's necessarily, doesn't have to be socialism or fascism or anything like that.
00:46:17.160I think it has a certain interpretation of human nature, which was, we now know is wrong. We know that doesn't function.
00:46:23.040So why am I a socialist? I would actually, I'm a Marxist, frankly, and we'll get, I can also go back to a few what I would call success stories regarding democratic socialism.
00:46:32.760I'm a socialist because I believe that workers generally should be as close to the product of their labour as possible.
00:46:39.680They should have as little of it alienated from them as possible, which means a fair deal for workers, right?
00:46:44.840So if a worker is creating value per hour of £30 an hour, I think they should be earning a significant chunk of that.
00:46:51.320Clearly, there should be a little bit of profit, there should be some taxes and so on and so forth.
00:46:55.420But the idea that a worker should be exploited from the products of their labour, I think, is a moral affront.
00:46:59.740And I think that to me, I'm a Catholic, but that to me is almost like an article of faith.
00:47:04.380I think a good society allows workers to enjoy a significant share of the value that they create.
00:47:11.100In terms of Marxism, I'm a Marxist, the capital, das Kapital, is not a manifesto.
00:47:20.660He does a manifesto called the Communist Manifesto, but Kapital is called a critique of political economy.
00:47:25.740So what he does in capitalism, he's critiquing the classical political economists, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith, Ricardo and whatnot.
00:47:33.600And I know this is probably quite cliched for many people, and clearly that's not what happens in the 20th century.
00:47:38.480But Marx wasn't a programmatic thinker.
00:47:40.980He has some parts where he says you may need to do this, this or this, or he talks about, you know, civil war in France, military theory and whatnot.
00:47:49.540But the stuff that you see in the Soviet Union or with the Khmer Rouge is as connected to what Marx is talking about as, say, Nazi Germany is with Edmund Burke.
00:49:19.940Now, I'm not saying Singapore is a socialist paradise, but on things like, for instance, land, actually, how land policy works in Singapore is effectively a socialist policy.
00:49:29.680So, you know, I think it's hard to say, well, where has it worked?
00:49:32.960We've got very clear, identifiable examples of socialist policy working very well.
00:49:37.520To finish, it's interesting if you compare something like Singapore to Venezuela.
00:49:41.720If Singapore has oil, none of that happens, right?
00:49:44.860You do not let Lee Kuan Yew and a bunch of really intelligent, competent, remarkable young men run a country if they have a shed load of hydrocarbons.
00:49:53.040Because we have many examples where people tried to do that and they mostly got murdered.
00:49:57.760Singapore's advantage was it had no natural resources and it was in the same neighbourhood as Vietnam and China.
00:50:04.220So the US was actually quite happy to sort of say, well, look, let them do their thing.
00:50:07.460So it's a bit more complicated than that.
00:50:10.760And I don't want to be, I hope I'm never sort of seen as an apologist.
00:50:30.340So let's look at the positive lessons from what would you implement left-wing policies in this country that we do not have to make society fairer and better for all?
00:55:23.420Yes, someone who comes in now and contributes £30 worth of work an hour should get a significant chunk of that.
00:55:33.080But what about the fact that someone had to start this and take all of the risk for the worker to then come in and actually do it?
00:55:39.820Because we don't really live in the world that Marx was writing about where all you needed was a loom in a factory and then you just get some bodies in there to work it.
00:56:26.520But if you're paid decent money and you're doing well and your audience likes you, I genuinely think it's a perfectly normal, humane response to say, yeah, give the cleaner 15, 16 quid an hour.
00:57:05.100Because what they do is they'll go into a workplace, let's say a hospital or whatever, or a school, and, you know, they function on a similar-ish way to what we just sort of discussed.
01:01:10.700No, but the thing is, I don't think, I don't know about Francis.
01:01:14.700I certainly don't disagree that in a world where no one has to work, it sort of doesn't make sense that the people who historically have held the capital now own everything and no one else has anything.
01:01:26.880In a world where no one needs to work and everything is done by robots, a system of distributing resources fairly equally in that world is great, actually, I think.
01:01:37.160I'm sure there's counterarguments to that that I probably haven't considered, but I'm open to that.
01:01:40.880But what Francis was asking was something else, which is in the interim, because, you know, we're all going to live in that interim 100 years, right?
01:01:48.720There's quite a lot of human lives in that.
01:01:51.560When you raise wages, what you are doing is you're incentivising those jobs out of existence, right?
01:01:58.540And so isn't there a counterproductive element to some of those drives for higher wages in certain industries?
01:02:06.540Yes, there's a guy, he just died, actually, a guy called Mario Tronti.
01:02:09.740He was a Marxist-Italian sort of thinker.
01:02:13.720So historically, people have always thought innovation is driven by capitalists, right?
01:02:18.260Great levels of automation, new innovations to create things more productively.
01:02:21.520He says, no, it's created by workers in struggle, them struggling for better work, better paying conditions, more money, is the catalyst for better innovation, because that leads to, like, the things you're talking about.
01:02:34.940And this is literally, like, page one or two of The Wealth of Nations, right?
01:02:38.240So I think, again, even if you're not on the left, if you want a high-productivity, high-performance economy, there's the argument for higher wages, because you're going to create incentives for businesses to increase productivity, use more fixed capital.
01:02:59.140But if you have working-class representation, you have labour organisations, and the state is on their side, they can be reallocated to other parts of the labour market.
01:03:06.940They can be retrained, or you can say, look...
01:03:09.500The evidence is very poor on people being retrained.
01:03:12.360Well, in an ageing population, we probably will need to retrain some people to help, you know, with regards to elderly care work, for instance.
01:03:19.560I don't mean, like, retrain, design an app.
01:03:24.580But on things like, I think, I mean really demographic ageing.
01:03:27.500So I think in the US, over 50% of the jobs which are growing significantly are in relation to health and elderly care services.
01:03:36.100Because we're getting older as a society.
01:03:38.880We're having fewer babies, and people are living longer, generally speaking.
01:03:43.120So I suppose the quick answer is, in the interim, what do we do?
01:03:47.120I think there's a bunch of challenges in the 21st century that we need to take head on in, to borrow a phrase from Keir Starmer, a mission-oriented sense.
01:05:09.380But they have incredibly expensive care needs.
01:05:11.360At the same time, the tax base, the working age population, is comparatively shrinking.
01:05:15.900It has so many challenges with regards to growth, with regards to what healthy political culture looks like, and how you fund public services.
01:05:23.800So this is the thing, which I think it's a terrifying challenge, although it comes from a very good place, us living longer.
01:05:32.140And we generally don't talk about it enough.
01:05:33.640We need to do what you and I are doing, which is have more babies.